[Speech of Lord Rosebery at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1894. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, was in the chair, and in proposing "The Health of Her Majesty's Ministers," to which Lord Rosebery replied, he said: "No function could be more lofty, no problem is more complex than the governance of our Empire, so vast and various in land and folk as that which owns the sceptre of the Queen. No toast, therefore, claims a more respectful reception than that to which I now invite your cordial response--the health of the eminent statesmen in whose hands that problem lies--Her Majesty's Ministers. And not admiration only for high and various endowments, but memories also of a most sparkling speech delivered twelve months ago at this table, sharpens the gratification with which I call for response on the brilliant statesman who heads Her Majesty's Government, the Earl of Rosebery."] YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: No one, I think, can respond unmoved for the first time in such an assembly as this in the character in which I now stand before you. You have alluded, sir, to the speech which I delivered here last year. But I have to confess with a feeling of melancholy that since that period I have made a change for the worse. [Laughter.] I have had to exchange all those dreams of imagination to which I then alluded, which are, I believe, the proper concomitants of the Foreign Office intelligently wielded, and which, I have no doubt, my noble friend on my right sees in imagination as I did then--I have had to exchange all those dreams for the dreary and immediate prose of life--all the more dreary prose because a great deal of it is my own. [Illustration: _LORD ROSEBERY_ (_ARCHIBALD PHILIP PRIMROSE_) _Photogravure after a photograph from life_] There is one function, however, which has already devolved upon me, and which is not without interest for this Academy. My great predecessor, much to my regret, left in my hands the appointment of a successor to Sir Frederick Burton. That has cost me probably more trouble and travail than any other act of this young administration. [Laughter.] I have sought, and I have abundantly received, counsels, and it is after long consideration, and with the most earnest and conscientious desire to do not what is most agreeable to individuals themselves, but what is best for art in general, that I have nominated Mr. Poynter to succeed Sir Frederick Burton. [Cheers.]