apelain or Cotin, he would be
under a necessity of changing his name.

One circumstance, to which the English Academy should especially have
attended, is to have prescribed to themselves occupations of a quite
different kind from those with which our academicians amuse themselves. A
wit of this country asked me for the memoirs of the French Academy. I
answered, they have no memoirs, but have printed threescore or fourscore
volumes in quarto of compliments. The gentleman perused one or two of
them, but without being able to understand the style in which they were
written, though he understood all our good authors perfectly. "All,"
says he, "I see in these elegant discourses is, that the member elect
having assured the audience that his predecessor was a great man, that
Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man, that the Chancellor Seguier was
a pretty great man, that Louis XIV. was a more than great man, the
director answers in the very same strain, and adds, that the member elect
may also be a sort of great man, and that himself, in quality of
director, must also have some share in this greatness."

The cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so
little honour to this body is evident enough. _Vitium est temporis
potius quam hominis_ (the fault is owing to the age rather than to
particular persons). It grew up insensibly into a custom for every
academician to repeat these elogiums at his reception; it was laid down
as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time the
sullen satisfaction of yawning over these productions. If the reason
should afterwards be sought, why the greatest geniuses who have been
incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst speeches, I
answer, that it is wholly owing to a strong propension, the gentlemen in
question had to shine, and to display a thread-bare, worn-out subject in
a new and uncommon light. The necessity of saying something, the
perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire of being witty, are
three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest
writer ridiculous. These gentlemen, not being able to strike out any new
thoughts, hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves
without thinking at all: in like manner as people who should seem to chew
with great eagerness, and make as though they were eating, at the same
time that they were just starved.

It is a law in the French Academy, to