to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements
of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you
should estimate the balancing weight. These I propose in the present
course farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope,
a just--you would not wish it to be a flattering--estimate of the
conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order
that with due allowance for them we may determine, with some security,
what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have
sensibility, to admire.

2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider
duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this
moment current with you has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to
you besides, of such a Future for England as you may both hopefully
and proudly labour for with your hands, and those of you who are
spared to the ordinary term of human life, even see with your eyes,
when all this tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which
you have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed
perdition.

3. I wish that you would read for introduction to the lectures I have
this year arranged for you, that on the Future of England, which I
gave to the cadets at Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship
here, 1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusion of the
"Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very attentively, the close of
my inaugural lecture given here; for the matter, no less than the
tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and
ill-judged;--which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I
have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to
whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this