movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax,
by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of
regarding our own literature as a _hortus siccus_, this our neglect to
practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman's
liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it will
be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me,
pray; if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast a
record far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of a
similar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution
of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from
the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively
interest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses
addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Members
and Students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough to
say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studying
their work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort his
hearers to con them?--Why, because he is all the time _driving at
practice_. Hear how he opens his second Discourse (his first to the
Students). After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, he desires 'to
lead them into such a course of study as may render their future progress
answerable to their past improvement'; and the great man goes on:--

I flatter myself that from the long experience I have had, and the
necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which
like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in
offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a
great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit....