There was some good speaking at the Royal Academy dinner
this day week. The Prince of Wales said that, since his first invitation to the banquet thirty years ago, his "absences" had been like angels' visits, "few and far between,"—a very modest suggestion that Princes can ap- proximate better by their absence than by their presence to the beneficent influence exerted by angelic visitants. And Lord Roaebery was very amusing in his fancy that the official bodies seated on the right hand of the President were mere neutral Organs, sometimes inhabited by Conservative and soxntinkes by Liberal souls, and that the forms which he saw in the dim distance on Sir Frederick Leighton's left, were not men, but disembodied spirits in a /ocuspeenelentiiee He should have liked, he said, to seize the occasion to recommend to his audience a series of "Cabinet works of art," for the criticisni of which no adequate opportunity had been found in the place in which they were introduced. He refrained, however, and would only dilate on the imaginative side of Ministerial functions. He thought the Secretary for War, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, as a man of "boundless and virile imagination," might often picture to himself,—in dreams,—" a British Army taking the field in adequate numbers and with adequate equipment ; " and
as for himself, there was no limit to the imaginative visions to which his daily labours gave rise. He often followed the
sports of the fur-seal in the Pacific, and sometimes beheld his body laid as the corpus delicti on the table of the arbitrators at Paris. At other times, he found himself in Egypt, "watching on the summit of the Pyramids for those forty centuries which are supposed to inhabit them, and wondering what the forty-first is likely to be." On the whole, Lord Rosebery claimed from the assemblepd artists some sympathy for the Cabinet Ministers as "creatures of no imagination," loss than as powers that be.
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