The annual banquet which celebrates the opening of the Royal
Academy was held this day week, when the usual number of soft speeches, giving everybody to believe that everybody WM :en- chanted with eveeybody., were made. Mr. Childers said -the Nary owed much of its popular/ay to the dove of nur painters for paint- ing ships, in which case, as lielhad subsequently to admit that the best new ships-of-war are very ugly affairs, it is to be feared that the Navy will grow less popular in proportion as it grows more efficient. Mr. Gladstone defended the Exhibition of this year against the criticisms of certain newspapers, as inferior to none in recent times, and singled out for praise Sir Edwin Landseer's .pathetic picture of "The Doctor," at the Zoological Gardens,—an old brown monkey so-called, who, indifferent to oranges and other perquisites, is tenderly nursing a poor little monkey in the last stage of consumption, while a selfish little black monkey is eating one orange and avariciously reserving another in its hind hands for the future. That picture, said Mr. Gladstone, had for the first time tempted him to wish that "instead of a man he were a monkey " ; and even Mr. Disraeli, who was present, did not reiterate on this occasion his celebrated and somewhat osten- tatious adhesion to "the side of the angels."
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