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.