I had seen: the effect on me was not impressive; but I

These gentlemen, not being able to strike out any new thoughts,

hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves without

thinking at all: in like manner as people who should seem to chew

with great eagerness, and make as though they were eating, at the

same time that they were just starved.

It is a law in the French Academy, to publish all those discourses

by which only they are known, but they should rather make a law

But the Academy of the Belles Lettres have a more prudent and more