at this idea of an academy. But for the death of King James I., the scheme of Edmund Bolton, which was to establish an order of men of science and literature, and to subordinate it to the Order of the Garter, would probably have been carried through. A similar scheme was set on foot by Dryden and Roscommon; and another by Swift and Harley. Yet nothing was done. The Seventeenth Century incorporated the sciences, and the Eighteenth Century founded an academy of the fine arts; the Nineteenth Century did not complete their work by founding an academy of letters. Macaulay, in the last year of his life, spent an afternoon in drawing up a list of forty names for an imaginary English academy; but the forty are now dead, and the academy is yet to build. What Johnson has to say on the question he says in his Life of Roscommon:—
In this country an academy could be expected to do but little. If an academician’s place were profitable it would be given by interest; if attendance were gratuitous it would be rarely paid, and no man would endure the least disgust. Unanimity is impossible, and debate would separate the assembly.
But suppose the philological decree made and promulgated, what would be its authority? In absolute governments there is sometimes a general reverence paid to all that has the sanction of power and the countenance of greatness. How little this is the state of our country needs not to be told. We live in an age in which it is a kind of publick sport to refuse all respect that cannot be enforced. The edicts of an English academy would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them.
That our language is in perpetual danger of corruption cannot be denied; but what prevention can be found? The present manners of the nation would deride authority, and therefore nothing is left but that every writer should criticise himself.
