which the Maroons of literature may take a certain and deadly
aim. The editorial WE has often been fatal to rising genius;
though all the world knows that it is only a form of speech, very
often employed by a single needy blockhead. The academic WE
would have a far greater and more ruinous influence. Numbers,
while they increase the effect, would diminish the shame, of
injustice. The advantages of an open and those of an anonymous
attack would be combined; and the authority of avowal would be
united to the security of concealment. The serpents in Virgil,
after they had destroyed Laocoon, found an asylum from the
vengeance of the enraged people behind the shield of the statue
of Minerva. And, in the same manner, everything that is
grovelling and venomous, everything that can hiss, and everything
that can sting, would take sanctuary in the recesses of this new
temple of wisdom.

The French academy was, of all such associations, the most widely
and the most justly celebrated. It was founded by the greatest
of ministers: it was patronised 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