will
it be possible for them to conceive, either that our laws give a sanction
to an art which is declared infamous, or that some persons dare to stamp
with infamy an art which receives a sanction from the laws, is rewarded
by kings, cultivated and encouraged by the greatest men, and admired by
whole nations? And that Father Le Brun's impertinent libel against the
stage is seen in a bookseller's shop, standing the very next to the
immortal labours of Racine, of Corneille, of Moliere, &c.

LETTER XXIV.--ON THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND OTHER ACADEMIES

The English had an Academy of Sciences many years before us, but then it
is not under such prudent regulations as ours, the only reason of which
very possibly is, because it was founded before the Academy of Paris; for
had it been founded after, it would very probably have adopted some of
the sage laws of the former and improved upon others.

Two things, and those the most essential to man, are wanting in the Royal
Society of London, I mean rewards and laws. A seat in the Academy at
Paris is a small but secure fortune to a geometrician or a chemist; but
this is so far from being the case at London, that the several members of
the Royal Society are at a continual, though indeed small expense. Any
man in England who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and
natural philosophy, and expresses an inclination to be a member of the
Royal Society, is immediately elected into it. But in France it is not
enough that a man who aspires to the honour of being a member of the
Academy, and of receiving the royal stipend, has a love for the sciences;
he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them; and is obliged to
dispute the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as
they are fired by a principle of glory, by interest, by the difficulty
itself; and by that inflexibility of mind which is generally found in
those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study, the mathematics.

The Academy of Sciences is prudently confined to the study of Nature,
and, indeed, this is a field spacious enough for fifty or threescore
persons to range in. That of London mixes indiscriminately literature
with physics; but methinks the founding an academy merely for the polite
arts is more judicious, as it prevents confusion, and the joining, in
some measure, of heterogeneals, such as a dissertation on the
head-dresses of the Roman ladies with a hundred or more new curves.