1. Ladies and Gentlemen,—I never began an address under a more painful sense of its needing a long and very sincerely apologetic preface, nor with less time to speak one, for, as it is, I have had the greatest difficulty in bringing what I desired to lay before you into any manageable compass, and I have been forced to set down many things in apparently broken connection, to which I must in the outset try to give tenable clue. The whole body of the public is now interested and agitated by many questions respecting academies, galleries, and exhibitions of art; our preparatory art schools are becoming important national institutions, and their productions a valuable item of national wealth. But in all these efforts one fact seems to me much overlooked, and just the fact which, after thirty years of study of this subject, is of all that I perceived the most clearly manifest to me, namely, that the teaching of art from without is quite unimportant compared to the instinct of it from within; that we cannot by formal instruction obtain anything but a delusive imitation of it, and that all of it which is genuine springs necessarily from the national temper and life.

2. The art of a nation much resembles the corolla of a flower; its brightness of colour is dependent on the general health of the plant, and you can only command the hue, or modify the form of the blossom, by medicine or nourishment applied patiently to the root, not by manipulation of the petals.