"To be perfect, is the emulation which belongs to those arts in which you are engaged, and the anxious hope of the country in which you live. To animate you to that perfection, is the object of what I have now addressed to you. I am persuaded it is your ambition to be perfect. This Academy looks with pleasure on the progress of your studies, as it may look with pride on the high and cultivated state to which the arts have been raised among us ever since they have had the establishment of a regular school. It is no flattery to the present æra in Britain to say, that in no age of the world have the arts been carried in any country to such a summit as they now hold among us, in so short a period as half a century at most. Among the Greeks some centuries had elapsed, amidst no little emulation in the arts, before they obtained an Apelles. In modern Italy, without going as far back as we might, it took up a century from the appearance of Massaccio to the perfection of a Raphael. If, then, the British school has risen so much more speedily to that celebrity in art, which it is too well known and established to need any illustration here, what should hinder her professors from becoming the most distinguished rivals of the fame acquired by the Greeks and Italians, with a due perseverance in the studies which lead to perfection, and with those encouragements and support of patronage which are due to genius? "As the source of that patronage, we look up with affectionate gratitude to the benign and flattering attention of our most gracious Sovereign, to whose regard for the elegant arts, and munificent disposition to cherish every enlargement of science, and improvement of the human mind, his people are indebted for this public seminary, his own favoured Institution, and the first which this country has ever been so fortunate as to see established. Under his royal patronage and support, this Academy has risen to its present strength and flourishing condition. His patronage, which would be improperly estimated by mere expenditure, in a country not similar in the latitude of government, or in the controul over revenue, to ancient Greece or modern Italy, but properly by its diffusive influence, has been the source of every other patronage in the country; has inspired that refined taste and ardour for elegant arts, which have given in fact a new character to the people, and has raised within and without this Academy that body of distinguished men, whose works have contributed to immortalise his reign, as his love for the arts has become the means of immortalising them.