When in recommending the antique as the student's guide in copying the life, I comparatively might have seemed to depreciate the servile adherence to the model, I was perfectly aware that the use of life alone can supply the artist with the real expression, and consequently the real appearances of bones and muscles in varied action. It will not be suspected, I trust, that I meant to recommend the frigid introduction of that marble style, that pedantic stiffness, which, under the abused name of correctness, frequently disfigures the labours of those who, at too late a period for successful attempts at changing their manner, abjure or lose the courage to use what they had learnt before, and content themselves with being the tame transcribers of the dead letter, instead of the spirit of the ancients, and importers of nothing but forms and attitudes of stone. It is to life we must recur,--to warm, fleshy, genial life,--for animated forms. To Nature and life Zeuxis applied, to embody the forms of Polycletus and Alcamenes: and what was the prerogative of Lysippus, but to give the air, the "morbidezza," the soft transitions, the illusions of palpitating life, to bronze and marble? The pedantry of geometrically _straight_ lines is not only no idealism, it is a solecism in Nature. _Organization_, your object, is inseparable from _life_; _motion_ from organization: where organization and life are, there is a seat of life, a _punctum saliens_, acting through veins and branching arteries, consequently with _pulsation_, and by that, undulating and rounding the passages of parts to parts. Of the milliards of commas, or points, that Nature mediately or immediately produces, no two are alike: how, then, could she produce straight lines, which are all similar, and by their nature cut, divide, interrupt, destroy? The province delegated by the Academy to its teachers must be,--where hope promises success and sparks of genius appear, to foster, to encourage; but where necessity commands, rather to deter than to delude, and thus to check the progress of that compendiary method, which, according to your late President, has ruined the Arts of every country, by reducing execution to a recipè, substituting manner for style, ornament for substance, and giving admission to mediocrity.