the most important intellectual and social interests of our time. I have
not yet been able like the Prime Minister, to go round this exhibition
and see the works of art that glorify your walls; but I am led by him to
expect that I shall see the pictures of Liberal leaders, including M.
Rochefort. I am not sure whether M. Rochefort will figure as a man of
letters or as a Liberal leader, but I can understand that his portrait
would attract the Prime Minister because M. Rochefort is a politician
who was once a Liberal leader, and who has now seen occasion to lose his
faith in Parliamentary government. Nor have I seen the picture of "The
Flowing Tide," but I shall expect to find in that picture when I do see
it a number of bathing-machines in which, not the younger generation,
but the elder generation, as I understand are waiting confidently--for
the arrival of the "Flowing Tide," and when it arrives, the elderly
gentlemen who are incarcerated in those machines will be only too
anxious for a man and a horse to come and deliver them from their
imminent peril.

I thought that I detected in the last words of your speech, in proposing
this toast, Mr. President, an accent of gentle reproach that any one
should desert the high and pleasant ways of literature for the turmoil
and the everlasting contention of public life. I do not suppose that
there has ever been a time in which there was less of divorce between
literature and public life than the present time. There have been in the
reign of the Queen two eminent statesmen who have thrice had the
distinction of being Prime Minister, and oddly enough, one of those
statesman (Lord Derby) has left behind him a most spirited version of
Homer, while the other eminent statesman (William E. Gladstone)--happily
still among us, still examines the legends and the significance of
Homer. Then when we come to a period nearer to ourselves, and look at
those gentlemen who have in the last six years filled the office of