port, no brotherhood-No! Our Executive Department has done the best it could, for Governments can do but little. It is the people, the power of the people behind the Government that means everything.

We have allowed insensate prejudice, camouflaged but futile phrases to appear, but falsely appear, to represent the true heart of the American people, with all its idealism, with its breadth of human sympathy, with its strong desire that our country should do its share for peace and happiness and noble life in all the world.

Are the qualities which saved the soul of a nation worth that wealth and prosperity? But these qualities do not long survive disuse. The repercussions of our domestic strife seem to have prevented the effectiveness of our noblest impulses.

These, my friends, are some of the evils visited upon us by a hateful and contentious spirit from which may the good Lord deliver us.

LORD ROSEBERY

(ARCHIBALD PHILIP PRIMROSE)

PORTRAIT AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Speech of Lord Rosebery at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1894. Sir Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, was in the chair, and in proposing "The Health of Her Majesty's Ministers," to which Lord Rosebery replied, he said:

"No function could be more lofty, no problem is more complex than the governance of our Empire, so vast and various in land and folk as that which owns the scepter of the Queen. No toast, therefore, claims a more respectful reception than that to which I now invite your cordial response-the health of the eminent statesmen in whose hands that problem lies-Her Majesty's Ministers. And not admiration only for high and various endowments, but memories also of a most sparkling speech delivered twelve months ago at this table, sharpens the gratification with which I call for response on the brilliant statesman who heads Her Majesty's government, the Earl of Rosebery."

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY Lords, and GentLEMEN:-No one, I think, can respond unmoved for the first time in such an assembly as this in the character in which I now stand before you. You have alluded, sir, to the speech which I delivered here last year. But I have to confess with a feeling of melancholy that since that period I have made a change for the worse. [Laughter.] I have had to exchange all those dreams. of imagination to which I then alluded, which are, I believe, the proper concomitants of the Foreign Office intelligently wielded, and which, I have no doubt, my noble friend on my right sees in imagination as I did then-I have had to exchange all those dreams for the dreary and immediate prose of lifeall the more dreary prose because a great deal of it is my own.

There is one function, however, which has already devolved upon me, and which is not without interest for this Academy. My great predecessor, much to my regret, left in my hands the appointment of a successor to Sir Frederick Burton. That has cost me probably more trouble and travail than any other act of this young administration. [Laughter.] I have sought, and I have abundantly received, counsels, and it is after long consideration, and with the most earnest and conscientious desire. to do what is most agreeable to individuals themselves, but what is best for art in general, that I have nominated Mr. Poynter to succeed Sir Frederick Burton. [Cheers.]

I have at the same time made a change in the minutes relating to the conditions of that post, which to a greater extent than was formerly the case associates the trustees of the National Gallery in the work of selection with the new director. The trustees have been hitherto rather those flies on the wheel of which we read in ancient fable. It is now proposed to make them working wheels, and to make them work well and cooperatively with the new director. ["Hear! Hear!"] I hope that this arrangement will be satisfactory in its results. But, Mr. President, I have long thought, as an individual, that the task of a Minister or of a Government in coöperating with the Royal Academy, and with those who have art at heart, ought not to end with a mere appointment of this description. I take a larger view of the responsibilities of my office, and I should be glad to offer to you with great respect a few suggestions that have recently occurred to me with regard to the present position of English art, which I regard with some misgivings.

There is, first, the subject of portraiture. I am deeply concerned for the future condition of portrait painting. It is not, as you may imagine, with any distrust whatever of those distinguished men who take a part in that branch of art; it is much more for the subjects that I am concerned. [Laughter.] And it is not so much with the subjects as with that important part of the subject which was illustrated in the famous work "Sartor Resartus," by the great Carlyle, that I chiefly trouble myself. How can it be that any man should make a decent portrait of his fellow man in these days? No one can entertain so vindictive a hatred of his fellow creature as to wish to paint him in the

costume in which I am now addressing you. [Laughter.] I believe that that costume is practically dropped for all purposes of portraiture; and if that be so, in what costume is the Englishman of the present century to descend to remotest posterity through the vehicle of the gifted artists whom I see around me? We are not all sufficiently fortunate to be the Chancellor of the University. [Laughter and cheers.] We have not always even the happy chance to be a municipal dignitary, with a costume which I will not at present characterize. [Laughter.] We are not all of us masters of hounds; and I think that the robes of a peer, unattractive in their æsthetic aspect, have lost something of their popularity. [Laughter.] Again, the black velvet coat, with which we are accustomed to associate deep thought and artistic instincts, has become a little faded. [Laughter.]

I am told, and told four or five times every day in speeches delivered in various parts of the country, that I have no right to offer a criticism without offering a suggestive remedy. Well, Sir Frederic, I am prepared to offer my remedy for what it is worth, and for that reason I ask your coöperation. Why should not a committee of the Royal Academy gather together in order to find some chaste and interesting national costume, in which the distinguished men of the nineteenth century might descend to posterity without the drawbacks which I have pointed out? Robespierre had such a costume designed, and other great sumptuary legislators have had the same idea in their minds; and I would not push the suggestion so far as to imply that we should be compelled to wear this costume in ordinary life. It might be one kept to gratify the artistic instincts of those to whom we sit. [Laughter.] And I will make a practical suggestion by which this costume-when you, sir, have selected it-might be associated with the ordinary run of life. It might be made an official costume of a justice of the peace, and in that way the great mass of our fellow countrymen, with only a few and insignificant exceptions, of whom I am one, might descend to remotest posterity in a graceful, becoming, and official costume. [Laughter.]

I pass on from that, because I should not limit myself to portraiture in a great survey of this kind; and I may say that I

am curiously concerned for the prospects of landscape painting in this country. I have of late been doing a great deal of light traveling in behalf of the respectable firm which I represent [laughter], and I beg at once to give notice, in the hearing of the noble marquis who is more to your left [Lord Salisbury], that I now nail to the counter any proposal to call me a political bagman as wanting in originality and wit. [Laughter.]

But I have been doing a certain amount of light traveling in behalf of our excellent and creditable firm. The other day, on returning from Manchester, I was deeply and hideously impressed with the fact that all along that line of railway which we traversed, the whole of a pleasing landscape was entirely ruined by appeals to the public to save their constitutions but ruin their æsthetic senses by a constant application of a particular form of pill. [Laughter and cheers.]

Now, Sir Frederic, I view that prospect with the gravest misgiving. What is to become of our English landscape if it is to be simply a sanitary or advertising appliance? [Laughter.] I appeal to my right honorable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy [James Bryce], who sits opposite to me: His whole heart is bound up in a proposition for obtaining free access to the mountains of the Highlands. But what advantage will it be to him, or to those whose case he so justly and eloquently espouses, if at the top of Schiehallion, or any other mountain which you may have in your mind's eye, the bewildered climber can only find an advertisement of some remedy of the description of which I have mentioned [cheers], an advertisement of a kind common, I am sorry to say, in the United States-and I speak with reverence in the presence of the ambassador of that great community-but it would be in the Highlands distressing to the deer and infinitely perplexing even to the British tourist. [Laughter and cheers.]

But I turned my eyes mentally from the land, and I said that, after all, the great painter of the present may turn to the sea, and there at least he is safe. There are effects on the ocean which no one can ruin, which not even a pill can impair. [Laughter.] But I was informed in confidence-it caused me some distress-that the same enterprising firm which has placarded our rural recesses, has offered a mainsail free of ex