So complex having been the causes, so slow and progressively gradual the progress of the Fine Arts, highly grateful must it be to every truly British breast to consider the rapid advances they have made in this favoured Isle within the last fifty years: advances certainly unmatched in their former history, as in that period they have arisen from the utmost imbecility of infantine weakness (indeed almost from _non-entity_) to a vigorous maturity that leaves far behind them the emasculate efforts and puny productions of all other contemporary European nations. The causes of this unequalled improvement have notoriously been the countenance and fostering protection of his present Majesty, an admirer and intelligent judge of their merit, and the ardent spirit of emulation excited among the artists themselves by such exalted and distinguishing notice. These co-operating have produced an exertion of talents, a display of abilities, and emanations of genius that always wore in existence, but which required concurring circumstances to bring them into full action, and to cause them to expand their latent energies. And had the general patronage been correspondent to these fortunate incidents, had not the fashionable jargon of presumptuous, self-created, arbiters of taste, affecting to despise National art, vitiated the public mind, or rather strengthened an ancient prejudice there floating, it is not easy to conceive how much greater still would have been their progress. It is at least certain that our ingenious young artists would have been amply encouraged to exert themselves, and not suffered, after the most promising exhibitions of dawning talents, to pine in indigence and wretchedness, to sink into obscurity and oblivion, or (like the illfated, but most meritorious Proctor[o]) to hasten, in the very opening of life, the termination of mortal existence from the excruciating pressure of continued penury and misery.