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my remarks may perhaps feebly illumine the mountain-tops: but it will rest with you to trace out at your leisure the less elevated features of the plateau over which I shall have to conduct you. Into the valleys intersecting these, in such a course of Lectures as this, I can never hope to make any feeble light which may irradiate from me penetrate. You will, in the patient exploration which I may suggest, but cannot lead, find intellectual delights of infinite variety; for you have but to dig deeply into the soil, and as miners you will extract riches incalculable. Ores, you may rely upon it, abound of all but virgin purity. For myself I can only hope, firstly, that you may obtain and enjoy them, and secondly, that with a liberal hand you will dispense of your abundance to all in need thereof. They will be so enriched, and you be none the poorer.

You will find one of the charms of such investigations to be that the character of their results is essentially communistic. They will never lead you to hoard for yourselves. Your greatest enjoyment will be to spread your gains broadcast; you will make your delights the delights of others, and the hand of friendship you stretch out to all fellow-labourers in the field of Art you will find grasped with generous ardour by many.

The sympathies such kindred pursuits bestow are Free-Masonic, and will at once admit you to a fellowship and brotherhood with all who, like yourself, may be led to seek the beautiful; and, having found it, to appreciate it as "a joy for ever."

It has been a doubt and an anxiety with me whether it would be necessary or desirable that this my first course of Lectures should be illustrated by diagrams; and I have come to the conclusion that it will not be well to so illustrate them, for the following reasons: namely, that while I would desire to fix your attention upon what is most perfect in the Fine Arts, it would be impossible for any illustrations I could