At the Royal-Academy Dinner, yesterday week, the speaking was hardly
as amusing as usual. Mr. Disraeli again noticed the difficulties which Art encounters in our gloomy and smoky cities. 4' It is not, in a city like London, in the power of any Govern- ment to create a consecrated quarter, where groups of palaces and temples can represent the aesthetic convictions of a nation. The climate repudiates fresco, and although we are still suc- cessful in producing heroes, we are hardly so fortunate in producing their statues." Though incompetent to criticise the Academy, because "not so fortunate as to be an artist," and yet " so fortunate as not to be a critic," he would still pre- sume to describe the English school of art as chiefly marked by "originality." In the English school there is "no mannerism." The English school is "great in portraiture, in landscape, un- rivalled in humour," and where there is originality there will also be " immortality." it is difficult to read this speech without imagining Mr. Disraeli as taking a little laugh under his breath, between his rather disjointed sentences, at the simplicity of those who thought him wholly serious.
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