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.]

Now, Sir Frederic, I view that prospect with the gravest misgiving.  What is to become of our English landscape if it is to be simply a sanitary or advertising appliance? [Laughter.] I appeal to my right honorable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy [James Bryce], who sits opposite to me.  His whole heart is bound up in a proposition for obtaining free access to the mountains of the Highlands.  But what advantage will it be to him, or to those whose case he so justly and eloquently espouses, if at the top of Schiehallion, or any other mountain which you may have in your mind’s eye, the bewildered climber can only find an advertisement of some remedy of the description of which I have mentioned [cheers], an advertisement of a kind common, I am sorry to say, in the United States—­and I speak with reverence in the presence of the ambassador of that great community—­but it would be in the Highlands distressing to the deer and infinitely perplexing even to the British tourist. [Laughter and cheers.]