ians, which are built upon general
nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on
particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the
fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised
them from obscurity. Present time and future maybe considered as rivals,
and he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the
other.

A DISCOURSE
Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy on the Distribution of the
Prizes, December 10, 1772, by the President.

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 allotted sphere becomes an object, not of respect, but of
derision, when it is forced into a higher, to which it is not suited; and
there it becomes doubly a source of disorder, by occupying a situation
which is not natural to it, and by putting down from the first place what
is in reality of too much magnitude to become with grace and proportion
that subordinate station, to which something of less value would be much
better suited.

My advice in a word is this: keep your principal attention fixed upon the
higher excellences. If you compass them and compass nothing more, you
are still in the first class. We may regret the innumerable beauties
which you may want: you may be very imperfect: but still, you are an
imperfect person of the highest order.

If, when you have got thus far, you can add any, or all, of the
subordinate qualifications, it is my wish and advice that you should not
neglect them.

But this is as much a matter of circumspection and caution at least as of
eagerness and pursuit.

The mind is apt to be distracted by a multiplicity of pursuits; and that
scale of perfection, which I wish always to be preserved, is in the
greatest danger of being totally disordered, and even inverted.

Some excellences bear to be united, and are improved by union, others are
of a discordant nature; and the attempt to join them only produces a
harsher jarring of incongruent principles.

The