'(Ratuie Botes : 
tCbe Selbome Society’s nOaoasine. 
No. 54. JUNE, 1894. VoL. V. 
THE PILL-MEN IN THE PILLORY. 
HE following extracts, from Lord Roseber}f’s speech at 
the Royal Academy Banquet on May 6, deserve a 
corner in Nature Notes : — 
“ I am seriously concerned for the prospects of landscape painting in this 
country 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 constitution, but ruin their aesthetic sense, by a 
constant application to a particular form of pill. I view that prospect with the 
greatest misgiving. What is to become of our English landscape if it is to be 
simply a sanitary or advertising appliance ? I appeal to my right hon. friend, the 
Chancellor of the Duchy, 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 cause he so justly and elo- 
quently espouses, if at the top of Shehallion, or any other mountain which you 
may have in your mind’s eye, the bewildered climber can only find an advertise- 
ment of some remedy of the description which I have mentioned ? 
But I turned my eyes mentally from the land, and I say that, after all, the great 
painter of the present may turn to the sea, and there, at least, he is safe. There 
are effects on the ocean which no one can ruin, and not even a pill can impair. 
But I was informed in confidence — it caused me some distress — that the same 
enterprising firm which has placarded our rural recesses has offered a mainsail 
free of expense to every ship that will accept it, on condition that it bears the 
same hideous legend upon it to which I have referred. Think of the feelings of 
the illustrious Turner if he returned to life to see the luggers and the coasting 
ships which he has made so glorious in his paintings converted into a simple 
vehicle for the advertisement of a quack medicine — although I will not say 
‘ quack ’ because that is actionable — I will say of a medicine of which I do 
not know the properties. . But I turn my eyes beyond the land and ocean, 
and I turn them to the heavens and I say, ‘There, at any rate, we are safe.’ 
The painter of the present might turn his eye from the land and ocea.n, but 
in the skies he can always find some great effect which cannot be polluted. 
At this moment I looked from the railway-carriage window, and I saw the 
skeleton of a gigantic tower arising. It had apparently been abandoned at a 
lofty stage, possibly in consequence of the workmen having found that they sp'oke 
different languages at the point at which they had arrived. I made inquiries, and 
I found that it was the enterprise of a great speculator, who resides himself on a 
