Inaugural Address of the President , Sir W. R. Hamilton. Si 5 



study of those Faculties by which we become cognizant of truth ; 

 so, in Literature, or the study of the Beautiful, the highest place 

 belongs to the relation of Beauty to the mind, and the study of 

 those essential Forms, or innate laws of taste, in and by which, 

 alone, man is capable of beholding the beautiful. Above all par- 

 ticular fair things is the Idea of Beauty general : which in proportion 

 as a man has suffered to possess his spirit, and has, as it were, 

 won down from heaven to earth, to irradiate him with inward 

 glory, in the same proportion does he become fitted to be a minister 

 of the spirit of beauty, in the poetry of life, or of language, or of 

 the sculptor's, or the painter's art. The mathematician himself may 

 be inspired by this in-dwelling beauty, while he seeks to behold 

 not only truth but harmony ; and thus the profoundest work of a 

 Lagrange may become a scientific poem. And though I am aware 

 that little can be communicated by expressions so general (and 

 some will say so vague) as these, and check myself accordingly, 

 to introduce some remarks more specific and definite ; yet I will 

 not regret that I have thus for a moment attempted to give words 

 to that form of emotion, which many here will join with me in 

 acknowledging to be the ultimate spring of all genuine and genial 

 criticism, in literature and in all the fine arts. For we, in so far 

 as we are an Academy of Literature, are also a Court of Criticism ; — 

 Criticism which is to Beauty, what Science is to Nature. Between 

 the divine of genius and the human of enjoyment, we hold a kind 

 of middle place ; creating not, nor merely feeling, but aspiring to 

 understand : and yet incapable of rightly understanding, unless we 

 at the same time sjrmpathize. 



To express myself then in colder and more technical terms, I 

 should wish that metaphysico-ethical and metaphysico-sesthetical 

 essays, — those which treat generally of the beautiful in action and in 

 art, and are connected rather with the study of the beauty-loving 

 mind itself, than of the particular products or objects which that mind 

 may generate or contemplate, — should ])e considered as entitled to 

 the foremost place among our literary memoirs. After these cl priori 

 inquiries into the principles of beauty, which are rather prepa- 

 ratory to criticism than criticism itself, or which, at least, deserve 

 to be called criticism universal, should be ranked, I think, that 

 important but cl posteriori and inductive species of criticism, 

 which, from the study of some actual master-pieces, collects certain 

 great rules as valid, without deducing them as necessary from 

 any higher principles. And last, yet still deserving of high honour, 

 I would rank those researches of detail, those particulars, and 

 helps, and applications of criticism, which, if they be, in a large 

 philosophical view, subordinate and subsidiary to principles, and 

 to rules of universal validity, yet form perhaps the larger part of 

 the habitual and ordinary studies of men of erudition ; such as the 

 difi^erences and affinities of languages, and the explication of ob- 

 scure passages in ancient authors. Whatever metaphysical pre- 

 ference I may feel for inquiries of the two former kinds, no one, I 

 hope, will misconceive me as speaking of this last class of re- 



