The English had an Academy of Sciences many years before us,but then it is not under such prudent regulations as ours,the only reason of which very possibly is,because it was founded before the Academy of Paris;for had it been founded after,it would very probably have adopted some of the sage laws of the former and improved upon others.
Two things,and those the most essential to man,are wanting in the Royal Society of London,I mean rewards and laws.A seat in the Academy at Paris is a small but secure fortune to a geometrician or a chemist;but this is so far from being the case at London,that the several members of the Royal Society are at a continual,though indeed small expense.Any man in England who declares himself a lover of the mathematics and natural philosophy,and expresses an inclination to be a member of the Royal Society,is immediately elected into it.But in France it is not enough that a man who aspires to the honour of being a member of the Academy,and of receiving the royal stipend,has a love for the sciences;he must at the same time be deeply skilled in them;and is obliged to dispute the seat with competitors who are so much the more formidable as they are fired by a principle of glory,by interest,by the difficulty itself;and by that inflexibility of mind which is generally found in those who devote themselves to that pertinacious study,the mathematics.
The Academy of Sciences is prudently confined to the study of Nature,and,indeed,this is a field spacious enough for fifty or threescore persons to range in.That of London mixes indiscriminately literature with physics;but methinks the founding an academy merely for the polite arts is more judicious,as it prevents confusion,and the joining,in some measure,of heterogeneals,such as a dissertation on the head-dresses of the Roman ladies with a hundred or more new curves.
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.
Congreve,who may be called their Moliere,and several other eminent persons whose names I have forgot;all these would have raised the glory of that body to a great height even in its infancy.But Queen Anne being snatched suddenly from the world,the Whigs were resolved to ruin the protectors of the intended academy,a circumstance that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature.The members of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who first formed that of the French,for Swift,Prior,Congreve,Dryden,Pope,Addison,&c.had fixed the English tongue by their writings;whereas Chapelain,Colletet,Cassaigne,Faret,Perrin,Cotin,our first academicians,were a disgrace to their country;and so much ridicule is now attached to their very names,that if an author of some genius in this age had the misfortune to be called Chapelain or Cotin,he would be under a necessity of changing his name.
