The Academy banquet was given, as usual, on Saturday, the
place of Sir Frederic Leighton being taken by Sir John Millais. Perhaps for that reason the speeches were not so brilliant as usual. The Duke of Cambridge, now a very old man, thought the dinner a fit opportunity for defending him- self; but had little to say except that reforms might be dangerous, and that the expedition to Chitral was very well managed. Sir J. Millais made a speech which, though most gracious towards the absent President, was quite curiously egoistic,—there are twenty-eight capital "l's" in the report ; and even the star of the evening, Lord Rosebery, did not shine as brightly as usual. We have noticed the section of his speech which referred to art, elsewhere—it was mainly an expression of his regret that the State was not a more liberal patron—but he prefaced it by a reference to his own seclusion, during which, as he read the papers, he sometimes doubted if he had resigned or was dead; laughed at the failure of the prophecies made last year that he would not again, at an Academy dinner, return thanks for her Majesty's Ministers; and mentioned the Japanese question as "a new Eastern question which has been snperadded to that of which we were already aware, which I confess to my apprehension is, in the dim vistas of futurity, infinitely graver than even that question of which we have hitherto known." He did not, however, explain in any way the nature of the fear which oppressed him, but shied away from the subject as if he had said too much.
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