Lord Derby made a remarkable confession, in presiding yester- day
week at the dinner given after the opening of the National Horticultural Exhibition at Manchester. He said that his experi- ence of public-dinner speaking had been derived from attendance at something like 500 public dinners. That is, within a public life of about thirty years or thereabouts, he has, as it were, dined, for the week-days of at least a whole year and a half, in public, in order to fulfil the purposes of that peculiar kind of British demonstration of which high-fed speech is the essential feature. To spend five per cent. of your evenings during mature life in feeding in public and drinking a number of toasts, exceedingly few of which can command more than the most mechanical sort of interest in your breast, implies a very formidable sort of extra sacrifice, by way of parenthetical addition to the regular and legitimate work of a public man. Some of the consequences of civilisation are truly unexpected, and almost of a nature to cause depair. Nor is it the least marvellous of these, that it leads to this offering-up of very substantial fragments of the vital power of our ablest men, in elaborate sacrificial rites, the fulfil- ment of which is required, in great part, of their stomachs, in some part, of their lungs, and in but a very minute portion indeed of their hearts and brains.
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