Lords, and gentlemen,--Literature, no doubt, is a great and
splendid art, allied to that great and splendid art of which
we see around us the handiwork. But, Sir, you do me an un-
deserved honour when, as President of the Royal Academy,
you desire me to speak in the name of Literature. Whatever
I may have once wished or intended, my life is not that of a
man of letters, but of an Inspector of Schools (a laugh), and
it is with embarrassment that I now stand up in the
dreaded presence of my own official chiefs (a laugh), who
have lately been turning upon their Inspectors an eye of
some suspicion. (A laugh.) Therefore, Sir, I cannot quite
with propriety speak here as a literary man and a brother
artist; but, since you have called upon me, let me at least
quote to you, and apply for my own benefit and that of
others, something from an historian of literature. Fauriel,
the French literary historian, tells us of a colony of Greeks
settled somewhere in Southern Italy, who retained for an
extraordinary length of time their Greek language and
civilization. However, time and circumstance were at
last too strong for them; they began to lose, they felt
themselves losing their distinctive Greek character; they
grew like all the other people about them. Only, once
every year they assembled themselves together at a public
festival of their community, and there, in language which
the inroads of barbarism were every year more and more
debasing, they reminded one another that they were once
Greeks. (Cheers and a laugh.) How many of your guests
to-night, Sir, may remind one another of the same thing.
(Hear, hear.) The brilliant statesman at the head of Her
Majesty's Government, to whom we shall listen with so
much admiration by-and-by, may even boast that he was
born in Arcadia. (Cheers and a laugh.) To no people,
probably, does it so often happen to have to break
in great measure with their vocation and with the
Muses, as to the men of letters for whom you have sum-
moned me to speak. (Cheers) But perhaps there
is no one man here, however positive and prosaic, who
has not at some time or other of his life, and in some
form or other, felt something of that desire for the truth
and beauty of things which makes the Greek, the
artist. (Hear, hear.) The year goes round for us amid
other pre-occupations; then, with the Spring, arrives your
hour. You collect us at this festival; you surround us with
enchantment, and call upon us to remember, and in our
stammering and imperfect language to confess that we were
once Greeks. (Cheers.) If we have not forgotten it, the
reminder is delightful; if we have forgotten it, it is salu-
tary. (Hear, hear.) In the common and practical life of
this country, in its government, politics, commerce, law,
medicine--even in its religion-some compliance with men's
conventionality, vulgarity, folly, and ignobleness, a certain
dose of claptrap (a laugh) passes almost for a thing of ne-
cessity. But in that world to which we have sometimes
aspired, in your world of art, Sir, in the Greek world-for
so I will call it after the wonderful people who introduced
> mankind to it-in the Greek world of

trap and compliance with
(Hear, hear.) Let us be
us; for reminding us that
to find by taking one's law
of the passing day, but fro
nature;-