As there is very little order and regularity in the Royal Society, and
not the least encouragement; and that the Academy of Paris is on a quite
different foot, it is no wonder that our transactions are drawn up in a
more just and beautiful manner than those of the English. Soldiers who
are under a regular discipline, and besides well paid, must necessarily
at last perform more glorious achievements than others who are mere
volunteers. It must indeed be confessed that the Royal Society boast
their Newton, but then he did not owe his knowledge and discoveries to
that body; so far from it, that the latter were intelligible to very few
of his fellow members. A genius like that of Sir Isaac belonged to all
the academies in the world, because all had a thousand things to learn of
him.

The celebrated Dean Swift formed a design, in the latter end of the late
Queen's reign, to found an academy for the English tongue upon the model
of that of the French. This project was promoted by the late Earl of
Oxford, Lord High Treasurer, and much more by the Lord Bolingbroke,
Secretary of State, who had the happy talent of speaking without
premeditation in the Parliament House with as much purity as Dean Swift
wrote in his closet, and who would have been the ornament and protector
of that academy. Those only would have been chosen members of it whose
works will last as long as the English tongue, such as Dean Swift, Mr.
Prior, whom we saw here invested with a public character, and whose fame
in England is equal to that of La Fontaine in France; Mr. Pope, the
English Boileau, Mr. Congreve, who may be called their Moliere, and
several other eminent persons whose names I have forgot; all these would
have raised the glory of that body to a great height even in its infancy.
But Queen Anne being snatched suddenly from the world, the Whigs were
resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy, a circumstance
that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature. The members
of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who
first formed that of the French, for Swift, Prior, Congreve, Dryden,
Pope, Addison, &c. had fixed the English tongue by their writings;
whereas Chapelain, Colletet, Cassaigne, Faret, Perrin, Cotin, our first
academicians, were a disgrace to their country; and so much ridicule is
now attached to their very names, that if an author of some genius in
this age had the misfortune to be called Ch