The post of President of the Royal Academy he held for only six months, for he succeeded Lord Leighton on February 20th, 1896, and died on 13th of August in the same year. His election, however, rounded off appropriately that long association with the Academy to which he referred in his speech at the 1895 banquet, at which he presided in the absence of Lord Leighton. "I must tell you briefly my connection with this Academy. I entered the Antique School as a probationer, when I was eleven years of age; then became a student in the Life School; and I have risen from stage to stage until I reached the position I now hold of Royal Academician: so that, man and boy, I have been intimately connected with this Academy for more than half a century. I have received here a free education as an artist--an advantage any lad may enjoy who can pass a qualifying examination--and I owe the Academy a debt of gratitude I never can repay. I can, however, make this return--I can give it my love. I love everything belonging to it; the casts I have drawn from as a boy, the books I have consulted in our Library, the very benches I have sat on." No other teaching institution had, indeed, had any part in his education; no other art society had given him assistance at a moment when the world was against him; and in no other direction had such practical belief in the greatness of his future been manifested. Truly, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Academy, and he repaid it by being ever one of its most active supporters, and by doing infinite credit to its best traditions. There was something peculiarly pathetic in the fact that his life should have ended just when he had reached the position that must have seemed to him, after his long and intimate connection with the Academy, the most honourable to which he could aspire. To be the head of the institution that he loved so well, and to be hailed as chief in the place that had seen every stage of his development, from childhood to ripe maturity, could not fail to be anything but exquisitely gratifying to a man of his nature. But almost at the moment of his election it appeared that there was little time left him in which to enjoy the honour that had crowned his many years of devotion to the great principles of art. The fatal disease that had gripped him a little while before was not to be shaken off, and was sapping rapidly and effectually even his superb vitality. He worked on, however, almost to the end, hopeful even in the midst of suffering, active in carrying out the duties of his office, and busy as ever with the canvases that crowded his studio. He was fully represented in the Academy Exhibition of 1896, by a group of portraits, and by a picture, _A Forerunner_, which showed no sign of failing strength or of any relaxation in his grasp of the essentials of his craft.