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Excerpt from Chapters of the Biographical History of the French Academy: With an Appendix Relating to the Unpublished Monastic Chronicle, Entitled, Liber De Hyda
On this side the Channel, we have been accustomed to think of endowed and privileged literary associations, as of a somewhat cumbrous machinery for thrusting the heads of dwarfs up to a temporary level with the heads of great men. We cannot, or cannot very easily, enter into the views and feelings with which many highly educated and accomplished Frenchmen will talk of the private doings, and of the public displays of the "French Academy." When we find a man of the world, and a statesman - as well as a distinguished author - like the Count de Montalembert, writing (as he wrote in 1863) of the membership of the French Academy, as being "the noblest reward which, in our days, can crown a glorious and independent life," we are apt to regard it as, at all events, a highly rhetorical phrase. The flutter of excitement which an academical election in Paris often creates, amongst the men of high scholarship, and of varied experience of life, as well as amongst the fashionable writers of the passing day, seems to us overstrained, if it be not puerile.
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