MR PRESIDENT, - By the Laws of this Institution, six lectures on architecture are to be delivered annually therein, and two years (1813-1814) having elapsed since I had the honour of addressing you as the Professor in that branch of the fine arts, I feel it to be incumbent on me to state that the omission has not arisen from any intentional neglect of duty, but from a severe and tedious illness which confined me to the house at the very time fixed by the Council for the reading of the lectures. I have stated the reason of my absence, to show my respect for this Institution and likewise to prevent my young friends, the students in architecture, from considering me deficient in that zeal towards them that I had pledged myself to exert, until the Academy selected some other person, better prepared than myself to discharge the important office of Professor who, by the regulations of the Academy, is directed ‘to form the taste of the Students, to instruct them in the Laws and Principles of Composition; to point out to them the beauties or defects of celebrated productions, to fit them for an unprejudiced study of Books on Art, and for a critical examination of Structures.’ These are the duties imposed on the Professor of Architecture, duties far beyond my powers, except in point of zeal and enthusiastic admiration of our noble art, I shall be amongst the first to declare myself little prepared to perform. Yet I must take encouragement to hope that my present labour will find favour with others, since it has been undertaken for no person's sake less than mine own.

In the lectures on architecture before delivered, I endeavoured to trace that most ancient and most useful of the fine arts from infancy to the best times of its perfection, and from thence through its different stages of decline and almost total state of darkness in the Middle Ages. After that eventful, that melancholy period, the state of architecture was shown in its happy revival under the auspices of the enlightened Leos and the liberal Medici; and from that splendid epocha, the subject was continued down to the present time.