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.