My despondency respecting this, and nearly all other matters which I know to be necessary, is at least as great,--it is certainly more painful to me,--in the decline of life,--than that which any of my younger hearers can feel. But what I have to tell you of the unchanging principles of nature, and of art, must not be affected by either hope or fear. And if I succeed in convincing you what these principles are, there are many practical consequences which you may deduce from them, if ever you find yourselves, as young Englishmen are often likely to find themselves, in authority over foreign tribes of peculiar or limited capacities. Be assured that you can no more drag or compress men into perfection than you can drag or compress plants. If ever you find yourselves set in a position of authority, and are entrusted to determine modes of education, ascertain first what the people you would teach have been in the habit of doing, and encourage them to do _that_ better. Set no other excellence before their eyes; disturb none of their reverence for the past; do not think yourselves bound to dispel their ignorance, or to contradict their superstitions; teach them only gentleness and truth; redeem them by example from habits which you know to be unhealthy or degrading; but cherish, above all things, _local associations_, and _hereditary skill_. It is the curse of so-called civilization to pretend to originality by the wilful invention of new methods of error, while it quenches wherever it has power, the noble originality of nations, rising out of the purity of their race, and the love of their native land. 95. I could say much more, but I think I have said enough to justify for the present what you might otherwise have thought singular in the methods I shall adopt for your exercise in the drawing schools. I shall indeed endeavour to write down for you the laws of the art which is centrally best; and to exhibit to you a certain number of its unquestionable standards: but your own actual practice shall be limited to objects which will explain to you the meaning, and awaken you to the beauty, of the art of your own country. The first series of my lectures on sculpture must have proved to you that I do not despise either the workmanship or the mythology of Greece; but I must assert with more distinctness than even in my earliest works, the absolute unfitness of all its results to be made the guides of English students or artists. Every nation can represent, with prudence, or success, only the realities in which it delights. What you have with you, and before you, daily, dearest to your sight and heart, _that_, by the magic of your hand, or of your lips, you can gloriously express to others; and what you ought to have in your sight and heart,--what, if you have not, nothing else can be truly seen or loved,--is the human life of your own people, understood in its history, and admired in its presence.