THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. Bertha to Osburga 5
THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. Alfred to the Confessor 31
THE PLEASURES OF DEED. Alfred to Cœur de Lion 61
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. Cœur de Lion to Elizabeth 91
In the short review of the present state of EnglishArt, given you last year, I left necessarily manypoints untouched, and others unexplained. The seventhlecture, which I did not think it necessary to readaloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statementsof which, whether spoken or not, it wasextremely desirable that you should estimate the balancingweight. These I propose in the present coursefarther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope,a just—you would not wish it to be a flattering—estimateof the conditions of our English artistic life,past and present, in order that with due allowance forthem we may determine, with some security, whatthose of us who have faculty ought to do, and thosewho have sensibility, to admire.
2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will findsummed a wider duty, and granted a greater power,[pg 8]than the moral philosophy at this moment current withyou has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to youbesides, of such a Future for England as you may bothhopefully and proudly labour for with your hands, andthose of you who are spared to the ordinary term ofhuman life, even see with your eyes, when all thistumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which youhave been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed perdition.
3. I wish that you would read for introduction to thelectures I have this year arranged for you, that on theFuture of England, which I gave to the cadets atWoolwich in the first year of my Professorship here,1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusionof the "Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, veryattentively, the close of my inaugural lecture givenhere; for the matter, no less than the tenor of which,I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and ill-judged;—which,nevertheless, is of all the pieces ofteaching I have ever given from this chair, the mostpregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether ofArt or Science, you may pursue, in this place or elsewhere, during your lives.
The opening words of that passage I will take leaveto read to you again,—for they must still be theground of whatever help I can give you, worth your acceptance.
"There is a destiny now possible to us—the highest[pg 9]ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. Weare still undegenerate in race: a race mingled of thebest northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper,but still have the firmness to govern, and the graceto obey. We have been taught a religion of puremercy, which we must either now finally betray, orlearn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in aninheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through athousand years