ON ACADEMIES.

In continuation from p. 260. YET, with this vivid consciousness of trespass, I still, on reflection, feel bound, ere I wholly resign this foreign field of illustration, to solicit leave, and supply, in rapid transit, an important omission in that department of my undertaken subject. I mean a name of existing celebrity, and of eminence, in cognate pursuits, scarcely inferior to the illustrious Cuvier, which cannot be passed over in promiscuous allusion to the number of writers who, from having adopted the language, are reputed natives of France. The Chevalier Louis Agassis, a Swiss naturalist, and professor at Neufchatel, has acquired the highest European reputation by various works, but more especially by his "Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles," now completed in six volumes 4to of letter-press, and six more of plates, in folio. It is a publication of unsurpassed merit on the matter. Mr. G. A. Mantell refers to it with just eulogy, in his "Medals of Creation," a very interesting elementary treatise, crowned with a humorous and characteristic letter from Mr. Thomas Hood, in which, however, I may passingly observe, that the epigraph-" Vincit omnia amor,' there ascribed to Ovid, belongs to Virgil, who says in the tenth Eclogue, verse 69-" Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori."-It was, indeed, natural enough on such a topic to think only of the great chanter and appointed master of love, as Ovid assumes to be

"

"Me Venus artificem tenero præfecit amori."

De Arte Amandi, lib. i. v. 8. Nor can I overlook the pretensions of France at this moment to a countryman of my own, Mr. Balfe, whose operas enchant the Parisians, and of whom they speak as one of themselves. His "Puits d'Amour" had at first attracted attention; and of his more recent "Quatre Fils Aymon," the musical reviewer, H. Berlioz, remarks, "Cette musique est pleine de vivacité, de verve, et d'entrain." England, in his conception, could produce nothing equal; and, in truth, our fame in the art stands on the lowest scale. Yet some misgivings of the author's naGENT. MAG. VOL. XXII.

tionality have transpired, but are repelled as irreconcileable with his superior merit. "Cette jolie musique serait-elle d'un Anglais ?" is the question asked in admiration, and resolved by an answer of incredulity. A few years ago I had occasion similarly to strip our neighbours of borrowed plumage in the person of an eminent mechanician, Mr. James Collier, a native of Staffordshire, but long resident in, and on his death claimed by, France. See Gent. Mag. for June, 1837, p. 584.

Although, no doubt, in a much inferior degree as to contributing numbers, or conferred lustre, the fame of Great Britain has yet occasionally been irradiated by borrowed light, and extended by alien genius in arts and science. I need only cite the names of Handel, of Herschel, or of Brunel and no higher names could be pronounced. Handel, or Häendel, is, in fact, the sole musical renown which England, and that, as just observed, not by birth but adoption, can array in parallel with the numerous celebrities of Italy and Germany. Of Herschel, originally a musician also, M. Arago, Secretary of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, &c. says, that he was one of the greatest astronomers of all times and all countries. His interesting report of the discovery of the sixth and seventh satellites of Saturn-the former on the 28th of August, and the latter on the 17th of September 1789, adverted to at p. 259 of the Sept. number of this Magazine by me, may be read in the Philosophical Transactions for 1789, page 350, and for 1790, page 10. Brunel's marvelous achievement can be only matched by the Canal of Languedoc, the operation, again, not of a native, but of an Italian Pietro-Paulo Riquetti, ancestor of the Prince de Chimay. See "Lalande's Traité des Canaux de Navigation," Paris, 1778, folio, and Gent. Mag. for January 1842, p. 35. The family name of Mirabeau was identically that of this Italian engineer; but the great orator's ancestors had been established in France for many preceding centuries, of which the celebrated democratic leader was not less proud than his haughty father, the misnamed "Friend of Man." No doubt again can exist that among the 4 F

victims of Louis the Fourteenth's intolerance, several in history, literature, and mathematics competently used our language; but, as in their military services, even those of Schomberg, Ruvigny, or Ligonier, no instance can be produced of signal eminence, so the refugees have not to boast of any elevated name in our intellectual annals. The fictitious Psalmanazar (Gent. Mag. for Oct. 1838, p. 380) wrote, with the raciness and familiarity of a native, our tongue, though born and educated in Languedoc. And Voltaire, too, during his sojourn among us, from 1726 to 1729,* published his Essays on the Civil Wars of France, and on Epic Poetry, subjects connected with his Henriade, as well as the dedication of that poem, in English, his knowledge of which, then little cultivated in France, he perverted into an engine of detraction against our stage. Still he occasionally renewed his attempts of composition, not very successfully, indeed, if we are to judge by what Walpole records of his letter to Lord Lyttelton, "written in English, but not a word

The exact period of Voltaire's stay in England is not defined by his biographers; but, from his Correspondence, I infer that he arrived there in September or October 1726. On the 16th of this latter month, he gives his friend Thierry his address at "Milord Bolyngbroke's ;" and his last letter from London, where he lodged in St. Martin's Lane, is dated the 16th of April 1729, with a conclusion in English of no decorous tenor. But it astonishes me to find Condorcet, the Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, affirming, in his biography of Voltaire, that Newton no longer lived when the poet arrived in England"Newton n'existait plus ;" whereas our illustrious philosopher's life was prolonged to the 20th of March in the following year, or six months posterior to Voltaire's visit to our shores,-by no means a voluntary one, it would appear, nor ever repeated. From a person of Condorcet's scientific eminence, and his bounden obligation of inquiry into every circumstance of the life he was writing, it is surprising to discover the least aberrance from fact in the relative dates of two such events as the death of Newton and the residence, so influential in its consequence, of Voltaire in England.

of it in tolerable English." (Walpole's Letters to Sir H. Mann, vol. i. p. 21, ed. 1843.) And in 1773, in his eightieth year, on receiving from the late Joseph Cradock a copy of the tragedy of Zobeide, partly derived from "Les Scythes," one of the feeble productions of the Patriarch's old age, the homage was thus acknowledged, embodied in a complimentary letter not apparent in Voltaire's published correspondence:

“Thanks to your Muse, a foreign copper shines, Turned into gold, and coined in sterling

lines."

The thought, with many of the expressions, are perceptibly borrowed from Lord Roscommon's well-known and spirited comparison in his Art of Poetry:

"The weighty bullion of one sterling line, Drawn through French wire, would through whole pages shine."

royal ordinance the 24th of January The French Academy, instituted by 1635, did not enter on its functions until the 10th of July 1637, in consequence of the opposition of the Parsubjecting to the already overgrown liament, grounded on the fear of authority of its patron, Cardinal Richelieu. No one more than the superb and not unlearned churchman was competent to appreciate or anxious to enlist this great moral influence in the service of the State, to which, as to the legitimately concentrating focus of rule, he sought to bind, in conspiring action, all the faculties of intelligent In fact, the identity of knowledge and power is expressed in the

man.

common idiom of France-an observation which I have not seen elsewhere -but exemplified in the phrases of "Jene saurais" and "Je ne pourrais," which are convertible terms, of indiscriminate or synonymous use; as, indeed, is Horace's Latin sentence,"Nescit vox missa reverti," where nescit is perfectly equivalent to nequit (Hor. de Arte Poetica, 390).† At length,

† So likewise, in the language of the middle ages, we find riches identified as synonymous with nobility and power, as they, more or less in operation, or, as instruments of attainment, must ever be,