I come to the point. I shall consider literature in a double sense. First, the thing in itself; then, its connexions with the sciences, and the men who govern. In England, it has been thought, or at least insinuated in some of the papers and periodical publications, that literature had been totally annihilated in France within the last twelve years. This is a mistake: its aberrations have been taken for eclipses. It has followed the revolution through all its phases. Under the Constituent Assembly, the literary genius of the French was turned towards politics and eloquence. There remain valuable monuments of the fleeting existence of that assembly. MIRABEAU, BARNAVE, CAZALÈS, MAURY, and thirty other capital writers, attest this truth. Nothing fell from their lips or their pen that did not hear at the same time the stamp of philosophy and literature. Under the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the establishments of the empire of letters were little respected. Literati themselves became victims of the political collisions of their country; but literature was constantly cultivated under several forms. Those who shewed themselves its oppressors, were obliged to assume the refined language which it alone can supply, and that, at the very time when they declared war against it. Under the Directorial government, France, overwhelmed by the weight of her long misfortunes, first cast her eye on the construction of a new edifice, dedicated to human knowledge in general, under the name of _National Institute_. Literature there collected its remains, and those who cultivate it, as members of this establishment, are not unworthy of their office. Such as are not admitted into this society, notwithstanding all the claims the most generally acknowledged, owe this omission to moral or political causes only, on which I could not touch, without occupying myself about persons rather than the thing itself.