that, to the latest period of its existence, even under the
superintendence of the all-accomplished D'Alembert, it continued
to be a scene of the fiercest animosities and the basest
intrigues. I might cite Piron's epigrams, and Marmontel's
memoirs, and Montesquieu's letters. But I hasten on to another
topic.

One of the modes by which our Society proposes to encourage merit
is the distribution of prizes. The munificence of the king has
enabled it to offer an annual premium of a hundred guineas for
the best essay in prose, and another of fifty guineas for the
best poem, which may be transmitted to it. This is very
laughable. In the first place the judges may err. Those
imperfections of human intellect to which, as the articles of the
Church tell us, even general councils are subject, may possibly
be found even in the Royal Society of Literature. The French
academy, as I have already said, was the most illustrious
assembly of the kind, and numbered among its associates men much
more distinguished than ever will assemble at Mr Hatchard's to
rummage the box of the English Society. Yet this famous body
gave a poetical prize, for which Voltaire was a candidate, to a
fellow who wrote some verses about THE FROZEN AND THE BURNING
POLE.

Yet, granting that the prizes were always awarded to the best
composition, that composition, I say without hesitation, will
always be bad. A prize poem is like a prize sheep. The object
of the competitor for the agricultural premium is to produce an
animal fit, not to be eaten, but to be weighed. Accordingly he
pampers his victim into morbid and unnatural fatness; and, when