extinguished.

Lastly, but not as the least important of our special powers, I have to
note our skill in landscape, of which I will presently speak more
particularly.

18. Such I conceive to be the directions in which, principally, we have
the power to excel; and you must at once see how the consideration of
them must modify the advisable methods of our art study. For if our
professional painters were likely to produce pieces of art loftily ideal
in their character, it would be desirable to form the taste of the
students here by setting before them only the purest examples of Greek,
and the mightiest of Italian, art. But I do not think you will yet find
a single instance of a school directed exclusively to these higher
branches of study in England, which has strongly, or even definitely,
made impression on its younger scholars. While, therefore, I shall
endeavour to point out clearly the characters to be looked for and
admired in the great masters of imaginative design, I shall make no
special effort to stimulate the imitation of them; and above all things,
I shall try to probe in you, and to prevent, the affectation into which
it is easy to fall, even through modesty,--of either endeavouring to
admire a grandeur with which we have no natural sympathy, or losing the
pleasure we might take in the study of familiar things, by considering
it a sign of refinement to look for what is of higher class, or rarer
occurrence.

19. Again, if our artisans were likely to attain any distinguished skill
in ornamental design, it would be incumbent upon me to make my class
here accurately acquainted with the principles of earth and metal work,
and to accustom them to take pleasure in conventional arrangements of
colour and form. I hope, indeed, to do this, so far as to enable them to
discern the real merit of many styles of art which are at present
neglected; and, above all, to read the minds of semi-barbaric nations in
the only language by which their feelings were capable of expression;
and those members of my class whose temper inclines them to take
pleasure in the interpretation of mythic symbols, will not probably be
induced to quit the profound fields of investigation which early art,
examined carefully, will open to them, and which belong to it alone: for
this is a general law, that supposing the intellect of the workman the
same, the more imitatively complete his art, the less he will mean by
it; and the ruder the symbol,