"My Lord, you are now on the Conservative side. Minor differences of opinion are infinitely insignificant at this time, when in truth there are but two parties in this kingdom--the Revolutionists and the Loyalists; those who would destroy the constitution, and those who would defend it, I can have no predilections for the present administration; they have raised the devil who is now raging through the land: but, in their present position, it is their business to lay him if they can; and so far as their measures may be directed to that end, I heartily say, God speed them! _If schemes like yours for the encouragement of letters, have never entered into their wishes, there can be no place for them at present in their intentions._ Government can have no leisure now for attending to any thing but its own and our preservation; and the time seems not far distant when the cares of war and expenditure will come upon it once more with their all-engrossing importance. But when better times shall arrive (whoever may live to see them), it will be worthy the consideration of any government whether the institution of an Academy, with salaries for its members (in the nature of literary or lay benefices), might not be the means of retaining in _its_ interests, as connected with their own, a certain number of influential men of letters, who should hold those benefices, and a much greater number of aspirants who would look to them in their turn. A yearly grant of ten thousand pounds would endow ten such appointments of five hundred pounds each for the elder class, and twenty-five of two hundred pounds each for younger men; the latter eligible, of course, and preferably, but not necessarily, to be elected to the higher benefices, as those fell vacant, and as they should have improved themselves. "The good proposed by this, as a political measure, is not that of retaining such persons to act as pamphleteers and journalists, but that of preventing them from becoming such, in hostility to the established order of things; and of giving men of letters, as a class, something to look for beyond the precarious gains of literature; thereby inducing in them a desire to support the existing institutions of their country, on the stability of which their own welfare would depend. "Your Lordship's second question,--in what way the encouragement of Government could most safely and beneficially be given,--is, in the main, answered by what has been said upon the first. I do not enter into any details of the proposed institution, for that would be to think of fitting up a castle in the air. Nor is it worth while to examine how far such an institution might be perverted. Abuses there would be, as in the disposal of all preferments, civil, military, or ecclesiastical; but there would be a more obvious check upon them; and where they occurred they would be less injurious in their consequences than they are in the state, the army and navy, or the church.