In the first place, it has been affirmed that republics are too economical--too niggardly in their expenditures, to afford that salutary and efficient patronage necessary to the growth of literature. To this I would answer, first, that this argument takes for granted that the literature of a nation advances or recedes in proportion to the pecuniary wages which it earns. Now, although I do not say with Dr. Goldsmith, that the man who draws his pen to take a purse, no more deserves to have it, than the man who draws his pistol for the same purpose, yet I may safely assert, that of the motives which operate on the literary man--the love of fame, the desire to be useful, and the love of money--the former, in the great majority of cases, exerts an infinitely more powerful influence than the latter. And if I shall be able to show, as I hope to do in the sequel, that the republican form of government is the one which is best calculated to stimulate these great passions of our nature and throw into action all the energies of man, then must we acknowledge its superiority, even in a literary point of view. But even supposing that the progress of literature depends directly upon the amount of pecuniary patronage which it can command, it by no means follows that it will flourish most under a monarchical government. For granting that this kind of government may have the ability to patronise, it is by no means certain that it will always possess the will to do so. Augustus and his Mecænas may lavish to day the imperial treasures upon literature, but Tiberius and Sejanus may starve and proscribe it to-morrow. That which depends upon the will of one man must ever be unsteady and uncertain. It is much easier to predict the conduct of a multitude--of a whole nation--than of one individual. The support then which monarchs can be expected to yield to learning, must necessarily be extremely capricious and fluctuating. It is not however by sudden starts and violent impulses, that a sound, solid, wholesome literature can be created. Ages must conspire to the formation of such a literature. Constantine the Great, seated on the throne of the Eastern Empire, with all the resources of the Roman world at his command, could not awaken the slumbering genius of a degenerate race, nor revive the decaying arts of the ancient empire. The literature of his reign, with all the patronage he could bestow upon it, did but too nearly resemble those gorgeous piles, which his pride and vanity caused to be erected in his _own_ imperial city, composed of the ruins of so many of the splendid monuments of antiquity.