their principal function has been to circulate and suppress new-coined words; regulating the pronunciation, orthography, and idioms of the French language. Is this a service or injury to the language? I should think the latter. "Instead of becoming, as they ought to do, the oracle of the age and their nation, our men of letters content themselves with being the echo of that dread tribunal; hence the abject state of literature in the capital. We have some, however, who boldly think for themselves, trust to the judgment of the public, and laugh at the award of the Academy. Nothing can better mark the contempt in which a few spirited writers hold the decrees of the forty forestallers of French wit and refinement than the following epitaph which the author above cited, the terror of Voltaire, the scourge of witlings, Piron, ordered to be engraved on his tombstone:-- "'Cy gît Piron, qui ne fut rien, Pas même Académicien.'" Many very distinguished writers have, in every generation since the birth of the Academy, been included among its members. Very few, however, of the forty members have at any one time been men of genuine literary distinction; a duke who has written a pamphlet, an ambassador who has published a volume, having always had a better chance of election than a popular novelist or dramatist. M. Arsène Houssaye has written a book entitled "The Forty-first Chair," which is intended to show, and does show, that the greatest writer of each successive period, from Molière to Balzac, has always been left out of the Academy: has occupied, that is to say, "the forty-first chair." M. Alphonse Daudet, to judge by his brilliant novel "L'Immortel," has no better opinion of the French Academy than had Arsène Houssaye some forty years ago, when his ingenious indirect attack upon the Academy was first published.