passed away, every
thoughtful judge of Art will confirm my assertion, that it contained not
a single picture of accomplished merit; while it contained many that
were disgraceful to Art, and some that were disgraceful to humanity.

It becomes, under such circumstances, my inevitable duty to speak of the
existing conditions of Art with plainness enough to guard the youths
whose judgments I am entrusted to form, from being misled, either by
their own naturally vivid interest in what represents, however
unworthily, the scenes and persons of their own day, or by the cunningly
devised, and, without doubt, powerful allurements of Art which has long
since confessed itself to have no other object than to allure. I have,
therefore, added to the second of these Lectures such illustration of
the motives and course of modern industry as naturally arose out of its
subject, and shall continue in future to make similar applications;
rarely, indeed, permitting myself, in the Lectures actually read before
the University, to introduce subjects of instant, and therefore too
exciting, interest; but completing the addresses which I prepare for
publication in these, and in any other particulars which may render them
more widely serviceable.

The present course of Lectures will be followed, if I am able to fulfil
the design of them, by one of a like elementary character on
Architecture; and that by a third series on Christian Sculpture: but, in
the meantime, my effort is to direct the attention of the resident
students to Natural History, and to the higher branches of ideal
Landscape: and it will be, I trust, accepted as sufficient reason for
the delay which has occurred in preparing the following sheets for the
press, that I have not only been interrupted by a dangerous illness, but
engaged, in what remained to me of the summer, in an endeavour to
deduce, from the overwhelming complexity of modern classification in the
Natural Sciences, some forms capable of easier reference by Art
students, to whom the anatomy of brutal and floral nature is often no
less important than that of the human body.

The preparation of examples for manual practice, and the arrangement of
standards for reference, both in Painting and Sculpture, had to be
carried on meanwhile, as I was able. For what has already been done, the
reader is referred to the _Catalogue of the Educational Series_,
published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I
wil