We have already remarked the wide range of Prince Albert's endeavours, study, devotion, and consequent usefulness. He presided at dinners of the Literary Fund, and of the Royal Academy; at the Trinity House most frequently, and at many agricultural meetings. Two of the best and most pregnant with good of his addresses, were delivered at the meetings of associations designed respectively for the better housing of labourers, and in behalf of the large and sorely tempted class of domestic servants. Now he presided at the Bicentenary of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; again at the two hundredth anniversary of one of our most illustrious regiments of Foot Guards. On art, as all were prepared to expect, he delivered ripe words of wisdom at the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, and in laying the foundation in the capital of his wife's Stuart ancestors of a new National Gallery for her Scottish subjects. Against the expectation, and to the loudly expressed surprise of all, save those who knew him thoroughly, he made a most admirable survey of the sciences and their uses, at one of the last meetings held ere his death, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Of art he was a judicious critic, as well as a munificent patron. It was at his special wish and option that the _savant_ Lyon Playfair was made one of his Equerries; and that a residence in Hampton Court Palace was put at the disposal of Michael Faraday. How much of mingled love for art and artists, and at the same time of criticism most kindly and sagacious, is to be found in these brief sentences, extracted from his great speech at the Royal Academy dinner:-- An unkind word of criticism passes like a cold blast over their tender shoots, and shrivels them up, checking the flow of the sap, which was rising to produce, perhaps, multitudes of flowers and fruits. But still criticism is absolutely necessary to the development of art, and the injudicious praise of an inferior work becomes an insult to superior genius. In this respect, our times are peculiarly favourable when compared with those when Madonnas were painted in the seclusion of convents; for we have now on the one hand the eager competition of a vast array of artists of every degree of talent and skill, and on the other, as judge, a great public, for the greater part wholly uneducated in art, and thus led by professional writers who often strive to impress the public with a great idea of their own artistic knowledge, by the merciless manner in which they treat works which cost those who produced them the highest efforts of mind or feeling.