ABSTRACT
This oration was printed in several newspapers at the time of the Stratford Jubilee, e.g. in Lloyd's Evening Post,1–4 September 1769, as a piece ‘intended to be spoken by Mr. Garrick’; subsequent writers believed that it had been spoken, or indeed written by Garrick, but Deelman (op. cit,pp. 231–2) shows that there is no evidence for either claim. This text is from R. B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford, n.d. [1806]), pp. 191–6. In her Garrick's Jubilee (Columbus, Ohio, 1964), pp. 127–42, M. W. England attributes it to Burke on stylistic grounds, but without any certainty; the same identification had been made by the Victorian critic, Charles Knight.
