Page:Fineartasketchi01wyatgoog.djvu/20

adapted to develope and elevate both. Such influences should mould and fashion succeeding generations to tread boldly and steadily in those arduous paths of scientific investigation, intellectual labour, and the highly refined appreciation of the beautiful, upon which the Finest Art must ever rest; and the importance of which to our prosperity, as a country standing in the van of civilisation, increases from year to year with the intensity of the cumulative competition it has to enter into and sustain with other nations.

In France, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Italy, and even in far-away Russia and other regions of the North, those arts which will specially engage our attention henceforth in Cambridge have long and constantly received due and systematic cultivation.

In England the efforts to induce any such recognition have been more recent and more spasmodic, occasionally strenuous, and then again relaxed; the eccentricities and defalcations (if I may use such expressions) on the part of the teachers, and of the system, or rather want of system, under which they may have hitherto laboured, being partially compensated for only by the peculiar native energy of the British student.

It would be absurd to deny that the English, as a body of artists, do not at this present time stand respectably before the world; but it is rather to that vital energy to which I have alluded, than to any systematic cultivation of their abilities, that they stand indebted for the honourable position they may be held to occupy.

There is, however, left to us the happy reflection that if, with the interjectional and interrupted studies hitherto pursued by English artists, they have attained the position they now occupy as compared with their continental rivals, how much may we not hope will be effected by their talents, when fostered and encouraged, and indeed helped over the