Annual Address. 



29 



ton are of unsurpassed beauty and excellence, combining 

 as they all do, all that is most graceful in classic art and 

 decoration, with the perfection of modern material and 

 workmanship. This perfection of British manufacture in 

 this line is of recent date, and is attributable directly to the 

 influence of just such exhibitions and institutions as I have 

 referred to, and I have gone into this detail in order to 

 bring more clearly before you the immediate bearing of 

 the fine arts upon useful arts, and to show that while they 

 elevate and refine the taste, and afford us some of the 

 highest pleasures of which our nature is susceptible, they 

 do really in no less degree contribute to the material and 

 industrial interests of a people. 



To bring these remarks to some practical result, it seems 

 to me, that all the circumstances of our condition, as well 

 as the growing tastes and tendencies of our people, stimu- 

 lated as they are by increasing travel in foreign lands, call 

 for increased means of intellectual recreation and of 

 aesthetic culture. There is hardly a city in Europe of the 

 size of our own, that has not a public museum of art and 

 antiquities for the recreation and instruction of its citizens. 

 In music and in dramatic art, we have made within the 

 last few years much progress, and the result is, that all that 

 is best in those departments from every part of the world, 

 find here appreciation and ample reward. Such too would, 

 I doubt not, be the result in respect to the arts of design, 

 if we had the means of educating the popular taste. 



I am not so visionary as to suppose that we can at pre- 

 sent in this country, and much less in an interior city like 

 this, attempt with any probability of success, the organiza- 

 tion of any institution upon any such scale as those I have 

 been describing. But there is great virtue in making a 

 beginning, and in doing even in a small way that which is 

 within our power. If we can procure proper rooms, why 

 should we not, after arranging our present library and col- 



