This is the real use of our Institution, if we may judge from analogy. Soon after the middle of the sixteenth century, when the gradual evanescence of the great luminaries in Art began to alarm the public, an idea started at Florence of uniting the most eminent artists into a society, under the immediate patronage of the Grand Duke, and the title of Academy: it had something of a Conventual air, has even now its own chapel, and celebrates an annual festival with appropriate ceremonies; less designed to promote than to prevent the gradual debasement of Art. Similar associations in other places were formed in imitation, and at the time of the Carracci even the private schools of painters adopted the same name. All, whether public or private, supported by patronage or individual contribution, were and are symptoms of Art in distress, monuments of public dereliction and decay of Taste. But they are at the same time the asylum of the student, the theatre of his exercises, the repositories of the materials, the archives of the documents of our art, whose principles their officers are bound now to maintain, and for the preservation of which they are responsible to posterity, undebauched by the flattery, heedless of the sneers, undismayed by the frown of their own time. Permit me to part with one final observation. Reynolds has told us, and from _him_ whose genius was crowned with the most brilliant success during his life, from him it came with unexampled magnanimity, "that those who court the applause of their own time, must reckon on the neglect of posterity." On this I shall not insist as a general maxim; all depends on the character of the time in which an artist lives, and on the motive of his exertions. M. Agnolo, Raffaello, Tiziano, and Vasari, Giuseppe d'Arpino, and Luca Giordano, enjoyed equal celebrity during their own times. The three first enjoy it now, the three last are forgotten or censured. What are we to infer from this unequal verdict of posterity? What, but what Cicero says, that time obliterates the conceits of opinion or fashion, and establishes the verdicts of Nature? The age of Julio and Leone demanded genius for its own sake, and found it--the age of Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, demanded talents and dispatch to flatter their own vanity, and found them too; but Cosmo, Ferdinand, and Urban, are sunk in the same oblivion, or involved in the same censure with their tools--Julio and Leone continue to live with the permanent powers which they had called forth. FOOTNOTES: [1] Vel duo vel nemo--turpe et miserabile! APHORISMS, CHIEFLY RELATIVE TO THE FINE ARTS. APHORISMS. 1. Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial. 2. The price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality. 3. Art, like love, excludes all competition, and absorbs the man. 4. Art is the attendant of nature, and genius and talent the ministers of art.