or blankets to the poor.
To be the most absurd institution among so many institutions is no small
distinction; it seems, however, to belong indisputably to the Royal
Society of Literature. At the first establishment of that ridiculous
academy, every sensible man predicted that, in spite of regal patronage
and episcopal management, it would do nothing, or do harm. And it will
scarcely be denied that those expectations have hitherto been fulfilled.

I do not attack the founders of the association. Their characters are
respectable; their motives, I am willing to believe, were laudable.
But I feel, and it is the duty of every literary man to feel, a strong
jealousy of their proceedings. Their society can be innocent only while
it continues to be despicable. Should they ever possess the power to
encourage merit, they must also possess the power to depress it. Which
power will be more frequently exercised, let every one who has studied
literary history, let every one who has studied human nature, declare.

Envy and faction insinuate themselves into all communities. They
often disturb the peace, and pervert the decisions, of benevolent and
scientific associations. But it is in literary academies that they exert
the most extensive and pernicious influence. In the first place, the
principles of literary criticism, though equally fixed with those on
which the chemist and the surgeon proceed, are by no means equally
recognised. Men are rarely able to assign a reason for their approbation
or dislike on questions of taste; and therefore they willingly submit
to any guide who boldly asserts his claim to superior discernment. It is
more difficult to ascertain and establish the merits of a poem than
the powers of a machine or the benefits of a new remedy. Hence it is
in literature, that quackery is most easily puffed, and excellence most
easily decried.

In some degree this argument applies to academies of the fine arts; and
it is fully confirmed by all that I have ever heard of that institution
which annually disfigures the walls of Somerset House with an acre of
spoiled canvas. But a literary tribunal is incomparably more dangerous.
Other societies, at least, have no tendency to call forth any opinions
on those subjects which most agitate and inflame the minds of men. The
sceptic and the zealot, the revolutionist and the placeman, meet on
common ground in a gallery of paintings or a laboratory of science. They
can praise or censure