NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE Academy dinner of Saturday was marked, as usual, by many flowing speeches, containing, we think, a somewhat un- usual number of striking sentences. Lord Salisbury, for example, who answered for her Majesty's Ministers, laughingly remarked that the Jubilee year had induced many institutions to make an " examination of conscience in respect of the fifty years, which has issued not in a confession of sins, but in an abundant con- fession of virtues." He also, not laughingly, described the House of Commons under the new suffrage as a place where the struggle lay between those who talk and those who endure, and victory went to those best able to survive under the "dreary drip of dilatory declamation," an epigram which reveals an imperfection in the English language. We have no word, though we need one so sorely, signifying " productive of delay." Professor Huxley, again, threw out a notable hint, notable in the fathomless depth of its Pyrrhonism, when he said, after pointing out that colours are but symbols, not necessarily real things, "I am not at all sure that the conceptions of science have much more correspondence with reality than the colours of the artist have," which suggests that only the arithmetician has no reason to be modest. Sir G. Trevolyan, too, was felicitous in his allusion to his own portrait as proof of what an artist might do with unpromising materials ; and his whole speech, though we elsewhere dispute its main proposition, in its perfect finish and graceful laboriousness smelt of a perfumed lamp. Politics were kept well out of the speeches, to the relief of mankind.
