Lord Beaconsfield spoke as usual at the annual banquet of
the Royal Academy, on Saturday, and said he would have defended his thesis of last year,—that imagination was the forte of English painters, but that he dreaded the storm of criticism, and "that most dreary duty of humanity, having to explain." This year, therefore, he would say that England, being a great country with a great history, English painters might find in history the inspira- tion which Greek painters and the Italians of the Renaissance found in their religion. Why not paint pictures of the Wars of the Roses, taking Shakespeare for their guide,—Shakespeare, that poet "greater than Homer ?" "Wider than Homer" would, perhaps, be a more accurate criticism; and certainly the English public would view with dread a deluge of pictures half-historical and half-stagey, with a Richard III., a portrait of Irving, and a Constance recalling only Ellen Terry. There is, however, a subject in the prologue to Henry V. which we are sure Lord Beaconsfield would appreciate,—the Bishops plotting to urge foreign war on the Ring, lest the Lollards should prevail in England, and attack them. Lord Beaconsfield, who has practised that Archbishop of Canterbury's policy, might fittingly be portrayed as giving that counsel.
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