at value a true school of portraiture may become
in the future, when worthy men will desire only to be known, and
others will not fear to know them, for what they truly were, we cannot
from any past records of art influence yet conceive. But in my next
address it will be partly my endeavour to show you how much more
useful, because more humble, the labour of great masters might have
been, had they been content to bear record of the souls that were
dwelling with them on earth, instead of striving to give a deceptive
glory to those they dreamed of in heaven.

Secondly, we have an intense power of invention and expression in
domestic drama; (King Lear and Hamlet being essentially domestic in
their strongest motives of interest). There is a tendency at this
moment towards a noble development of our art in this direction,
checked by many adverse conditions, which may be summed in one,--the
insufficiency of generous civic or patriotic passion in the heart of
the English people; a fault which makes its domestic affections
selfish, contracted, and, therefore, frivolous.

Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity and good-humour, and partly
with that very love of the grotesque which debases our ideal, we have a
sympathy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our own; and which,
though it has already found some exquisite expression in the works of
Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite undeveloped. This sympathy, with the
aid of our now authoritative science of physiology, and in association
with our British love of adventure, will, I hope, enable us to give to
the future inhabitants of the globe an almost perfect record of the
present forms of animal life upon it, of which many are on the point of
being extinguished....

While I myself hold this professorship, I shall direct you in these
exercises very definitely to natural history, and to landscape; not
only because in these two branches I am probably able to show you
truths which might be despised by my successors; but because I think
the vital and joyful study of natural history quite the principal
element requiring introduction, not only into University, but into
national, education, from highest to lowest; and I even will risk
incurring your ridicule by confessing one of my fondest dreams, that I
may succeed in making some of you English youths like better to look at
a bird than to shoot it; and even desire to make wild creatures tame,
instead of tame creatures wild. And