Essays

Gentlemen,—I congratulate you on the honour which you have just received.  I have the highest opinion of your merits, and could wish to show my sense of them in something which possibly may be more useful to you than barren praise.  I could wish to lead you into such a course of study as may render your future progress answerable to your past improvement; and, whilst I applaud you for what has been done, remind you of how much yet remains to attain perfection.

Gentlemen,—It is not easy to speak with propriety to so many students of different ages and different degrees of advancement.  The mind requires nourishment adapted to its growth; and what may have promoted our earlier efforts, might, retard us in our nearer approaches to perfection.

Gentlemen,—The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it.  As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art or a mechanical trade.  In the hands of one man it makes the highest pretensions, as it is addressed to the noblest faculties, In those of another it is reduced to a mere matter of ornament, and the painter has but the humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance.

Gentlemen,—I purpose to carry on in this discourse the subject which I began in my last.  It was my wish upon that occasion to incite you to pursue the higher excellences of the art.  But I fear that in this particular I have been misunderstood.  Some are ready to imagine, when any of their favourite acquirements in the art are properly classed, that they are utterly disgraced.  This is a very great mistake: nothing has its proper lustre but in its proper place.  That which is most worthy of esteem in its allo