This, then, seems a not inappropriate moment for considering more closely in detail than has commonly been done, the circumstances attending the most successful experiment that the world has seen to create and sustain a public body whose duty it should be to guard the purity of a national language and to insure the permanence of its best literary forms. It will not be necessary here to do more than remind our readers that the Académie Française was not the earliest corporation in Europe, or even in France, which was formed for the purpose of carrying out these difficult and perilous designs. It was simply the most successful and the most durable. As early as about the year 1490, an Academy was founded in Florence in the deepest piety of the Renaissance. Its motives were pathetically Greek. The gardens of the Medicis were to represent Academe; Arno was to be its Cephisus; in the great Plotinist, Marsiglio Ficino, it was to find its incomparable leader, its visible Plato. By the sixteenth century, Italy was full of imitations; there were the Intronati at Siena, the Della Crusca at Florence, the Otiosi at Bologna, the Humoristi and the Fantastici in Rome. In France itself, in 1570, the poets of the Pléiade instituted, under Charles IX, their Académie de Musique et de Poésie, which became in due course the Académie du Palais, and died inglorious during the Civil Wars. Later there was founded, in Savoy, that Académie Florimontane, which flourished for a little while under St. François de Sales. It was in imitation of those vague and ephemeral institutions that, supported by the powerful patronage of Richelieu, the great corporation which still exercises so lively an influence in France came, in the fulness of the seventeenth century, into permanent existence. It is too seldom realized out of what accidental conjunction of circumstances it arose, and how humble and unfavourable were the auspices which attended its birth.