Lord Rosebery's speech at the Royal Academy dinner last Saturday
was amusing, but a little flippant. It was hardly worthy of the dignity of a Prime Minister. After stating that under his own minute be had divided the responsibility of the new director of the National Gallery, Mr. Poynter, with the trustees,—a questionable course, as a divided re- sponsibility is very apt to be a disputable responsibility, in. other words, no responsibility at all,—Lord Rosebery went on. to be very jocose about the ugliness of the garments in which Englishmen usually sit to the portrait-painters, and suggested that Sir Frederic Leighton should design an official dress for sitters, adding that it might also be made the official dress of Justices of the Peace, "and in that way the great mass of our fellow-countrymen, with only few and insignificant excep- tions, of whom I am one, might descend to remotest posterity in a graceful, becoming, and official costume." This was a backhander at Mr. Bryce's Lancashire appointments, as well perhaps as at the assailants of Lord Herschell, and made the Royal Academicians feel that they were being gently ridiculed. Afterwards, Lord Rosebery went on to lament the way in which advertisements have disfigured English meadows and Highland landscapes by the introduction of ob- jects "distressing to the deer, and infinitely perplexing even to the British tourist," and anticipated that the beauty of the sea might be extinguished if the offer of a main- sail to every lugger whose owner would consent to take it with an immense advertisement of the objectionable pill across it, should be widely accepted. Lord Rosebery certainly made rather light of his subject, not to say of his host.
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