ronised by successive kings; it numbered in its lists most of
the eminent French writers. Yet what benefit has literature derived from
its labours? What is its history but an uninterrupted record of servile
compliances--of paltry artifices--of deadly quarrels--of perfidious
friendships? Whether governed by the Court, by the Sorbonne, or by
the Philosophers, it was always equally powerful for evil, and equally
impotent for good. I might speak of the attacks by which it attempted
to depress the rising fame of Corneille; I might speak of the reluctance
with which it gave its tardy confirmation to the applauses which the
whole civilised world had bestowed on the genius of Voltaire. I might
prove by overwhelming evidence that, to the latest period of its
existence, even under the superintendence of the all-accomplished
D'Alembert, it continued to be a scene of the fiercest animosities and
the basest intrigues. I might cite Piron's epigrams, and Marmontel's
memoirs, and Montesquieu's letters. But I hasten on to another topic.

One of the modes by which our Society proposes to encourage merit is the
distribution of prizes. The munificence of the king has enabled it
to offer an annual premium of a hundred guineas for the best essay in
prose, and another of fifty guineas for the best poem, which may be
transmitted to it. This is very laughable. In the first place the
judges may err. Those imperfections of human intellect to which, as the
articles of the Church tell us, even general councils are subject, may
possibly be found even in the Royal Society of Literature. The French
academy, as I have already said, was the most illustrious assembly of
the kind, and numbered among its associates men much more distinguished
than ever will assemble at Mr Hatchard's to rummage the box of the
English Society. Yet this famous body gave a poetical prize, for which
Voltaire was a candidate, to a fellow who wrote some verses about THE
FROZEN AND THE BURNING POLE.

Yet, granting that the prizes were always awarded to the best
composition, that composition, I say without hesitation, will always be
bad. A prize poem is like a prize sheep. The object of the competitor
for the agricultural premium is to produce an animal fit, not to be
eaten, but to be weighed. Accordingly he pampers his victim into morbid
and unnatural fatness; and, when it is in such a state that it would
be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The
obj