Providence Daily Journal

The Payne Festival.—This affair, on Thursday evening, went off exceedingly well, as we learn from those who were present.

The audience was brilliant and select; and the receipts from subscriptions amounted to about four thousand dollars.

Whether it arose from the haste of preparation, the accidents arising from the indisposition of some of the performers, or the constraint arising from the circumstance that a great deal was expected, we are not able to say: but we learn that the tragedy was not well played.—This disappointment was redeemed by the other exhibitions. At the close of the performances, Mr. Payne was loudly and unanimously called for.

He appeared and made the following address—laboring at first under very natural embarrassment, but presently recovering himself, and speaking in clear, mellifluous voice, while the enthusiasm of the audience, became still greater as he proceeded :

My honored countrymen, my most valued friends, I thought I should have been better prepared for the emotions of this moment; but it is long, very long, since I stood in person before the public, and so immeasurably is the anticipation from my wildest dream exceeded by what I now experience, that I am compelled to cast myself upon your indulgence for my inability to give my feelings utterance. And shall I not do so without apprehension, having the evidence before me of this brilliant scene,—the beautiful and the brave, the wise and the wealthy, clustering in one unequalled galaxy of lofty and of liberal hearts,—that for any thing depending upon kindness it is impossible to look to you in vain?—Grant me your pardon, then, if I am incompetent to acknowledge that kindness as I ought; for it is your own goodness that paralyzes the power to thank you, and I am dazzled, dizzied, surprised, overwhelmed.

When I think that in this place three and twenty years ago, my youthful steps first ventured before the public, feelings and associations rush through my mind— for which your own sympathies will find a language, that my tongue seeks in vain. The very theatre in which I stood, has since been levelled to the ground,— and though I am upon the same spot, there remains no vestige of the stage which the fond fancies of a boy arrayed in all the charms and promises of fairy land. Since then, the character of my ambition is changed; yet I can remember 'such things were and were most precious'; and the retrospect becomes the more touching to myself, now that I appear in it for the last time, and bid it formally and eternally farewell. It is a high satisfaction to me that my adieu to the stage, and my return to my home, should be marked by an event, which, to all Americans who devote themselves to literature and the arts, will give a glorious lesson.

It will show them that they belong to a country which is incapable of forgetting her sons,—and let those sons, whatever their discomforts, toil on and not despair, for the time will come, when they shall be nobly recollected. For myself, I do not acquiesce in the testimonial of this night, under any vanity regarding my own claims, which can mislead me as to its real incentive; but I have a deep sense of the responsibility imposed on me by this unprecedented kindness; and believe me, my excellent friends—believe me, my beloved countrymen, it will be the study and the prayer and the perpetual hope of my future life, to render myself worthy of the present moment, and of a country of which I was ever proud, and now, since I have seen other countries, am yet more proud than ever,—and of a city, in whose far-sighted, generous and gallant acts, hourly I witness fresh motives of exulting that it is my distinction to have been born her son.