There exist two Royal Academies--one for the improvement of the Spanish Language, the other for the advancement of National History. We owe to the former an ill-digested dictionary, with a very bad grammar; and to the latter some valuable discourses, and an incomplete geographical and historical dictionary. Had the _Spanish Academy_ continued their early labours, and called in the aid of real talent, instead of filling up the list of members with titled names, which have made it ridiculous; their Dictionary might, without great difficulty, have been improved into a splendid display of one of the richest among modern languages; and the philosophical spirit of the age would have been applied to the elucidation of its elements. That Academy has published a volume of prize essays and poems, the fruits of a very feeble competition, in which the poetry partakes largely of the servility of imitation to which I have already alluded, and the prose is generally stiff and affected. Our style, in fact, is, at present, quite unsettled--fluctuating between the wordy pomposity of our old writers, without their ease, and the epigrammatic conciseness of second-rate French writers, stripped of their sprightliness and graces. As long, however, as we are condemned to the dead silence in which the nation has been kept for centuries, there is little chance of fixing any standard of taste for Spanish eloquence. Capmany, probably our best living philologist and prose writer, insists upon our borrowing every word and phrase from the authors of the sixteenth century, the golden age (as it is called) of our literature; while the Madrid translators seem determined to make the Spanish language a dialect of the French--a sort of _Patois_, unintelligible to either nation. The true path certainly lies between both. The greatest part of our language has been allowed to become vulgar or obsolete. The languages which, during the mental progress of Europe, have been made the vehicles and instruments of thought, have left ours far behind in the powers of abstraction and precision; and the rich treasure which has been allowed to lie buried so long, must be re-coined and burnished, before it can be recognised for sterling currency. It is neither by rejecting as foreign whatever expressions cannot be found in the writers under the Austrian dynasty, nor by disfiguring our idiom with Gallicisms, that we can expect to shape it to our present wants and fashions. Our aim should be to think for ourselves in our own language--to _think_, I say, and express our thoughts with clearness, force, and precision; not to imitate the mere sound of the empty periods which generally swell the pages of the old Spanish writers.