Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
History
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Speeches, addresses, etc.
I am told, and told four or five times every day in speeches delivered
in various parts of the country, that I have no right to offer a
criticism without offering a suggestive remedy. Well, Sir Frederic, I am
prepared to offer my remedy for what it is worth, and for that reason I
ask your co-operation. Why should not a committee of the Royal Academy
gather together in order to find some chaste and interesting national
costume, in which the distinguished men of the nineteenth century might
descend to posterity without the drawbacks which I have pointed out?
Robespierre had such a costume designed, and other great sumptuary
legislators have had the same idea in their minds; and I would not push
the suggestion so far as to imply that we should be compelled to wear
this costume in ordinary life. It might be one kept to gratify the
artistic instincts of those to whom we sit. [Laughter.] And I will make
a practical suggestion by which this costume--when you, sir, have
selected it--might be associated with the ordinary run of life. It might
be made an official costume of a justice of the peace, and in that way
the great mass of our fellow-countrymen, with only a few and
insignificant exceptions, of whom I am one, might descend to remotest
posterity in a graceful, becoming, and official costume. [Laughter.]
I pass on from that, because I should not limit myself to portraiture in
a great survey of this kind; and I may say that I am seriously concerned
for the prospects of landscape painting in this country. I have of late
been doing a great deal of light travelling in behalf of the respectable
firm which I represent [laughter], and I beg at once to give notice, in
the hearing of the noble marquis who is more to your left [Lord
Salisbury], that I now nail to the counter any proposal to call me a
political bagman as wanting in originality and wit. [Laughter.]
But I have been doing a certain amount of light travelling in behalf of
our excellent and creditable firm. The other day, on returning from
Manchester, I was deeply and hideously impressed with the fact that all
along that line of railway which we traversed, the whole of a pleasing
landscape was entirely ruined by appeals to the public to save their
constitutions but ruin their aesthetic senses by a constant application
of a particular form of pill. [Laughter and cheers.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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