MR PRESIDENT, - I have endeavoured in these lectures to impress upon the mind of the student in architecture the necessity for close, unremitted, application, of deep, indefatigable, research, and that not a moment must be lost from study, even from earliest youth, by him who is desirous of attaining superior excellence in architecture. He must search deeply into the great elementary principles on which the artists of antiquity produced such mighty monuments of powerful imagination, elegant fancy, and refined taste. Those monuments of human talent that have never been equalled, and the ruins of which have been the admiration of the most enlightened minds in all ages and in all countries, these ruins should be the first object of our consideration and the basis of our taste. The values and importance of them can only be estimated by referring to elementary principles and primary causes. From an intimate acquaintance within these noble remains the uncertain wanderings of genius will be restrained, and the artist enabled to seize the spirit that produced them, and infuse the same feeling into his own compositions.

The students must not only be well acquainted with the buildings erected in different ages and in different countries, but they must endeavour, from the remains of ancient works, to learn what the Grecian and Roman architects would have done in their situation. By such a course of study we shall become artists, not mere copyists. We shall avoid servile imitation. Armed with fixed principles, which can only be derived from the sources pointed out to you, we shall not be led astray by fashion and caprice, or by a vain and foolish pursuit after novelty and paltry conceits so fatal to art in the lower ages; a period wherein buildings were erected of great magnitude and expense, and although objects of admiration at the time, they are not subjects for imitation. They reflect no honour on those who raised them, nor will they ever be referred to as standards of taste.

For want of those principles (so prominent in the works of the ancients) even men of genius and talent have only occasionally caught by chance, or rather stumbled on, what caused our admiration of the ancients.