The annual dinner of the /loyal Academy was held on
Saturday, and the President, the Duke of Cambridge, Mr. Gladstone, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Revordy Johnson made speeches. The Duke, returning thanks for the Army, said that in the midst of incessant demands for change he should bear in mind the instincts of the Duke of Wellington, whose centenary it happened to be, and selected for praise, with some felicity, Sir E. Landseer's "Swannery," not, we presume, as the best picture, but as the one most suggestive of blood and suffering. Mr. Gladstone congratulated the Academy on its new house, where one has "neither to dive nor to soar," and thought the Exhibition rather above the average. The Archbishop expanded the quotation "Emollit mores," &c., and maintained that the dissociation between art and religion which had occasionally occurred was good neither for religion nor for art, and that the knowledge of the beautiful, like the knowledge of the holy, was not gained by weperiment, but seemed to come in some sort from above,—a doubtful proposition, when art can be traced from the rudest ideas to the most subtle. Finally, Mr. Reverdy Johnson, a proper of things in general, and we suppose of art among them, held that "war between America and England would be a foolish and unpaying speculation," which is true, and would be important, if angry nations ever considered expense.
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