How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! How much better do the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence! But the question as to the utility of academies to the intellectual life of a nation is not settled when we say that we have never had an academy, yet we have, confessedly, a very great literature. It is by no means sure that either our literature or the general intellectual life of our nation has got already without academies all that academies can give. Our literature, in spite of the genius manifested in it, may fall short in form, method, precision, proportions, arrangement--all things where intelligence proper comes in. It may be weak in prose, full of haphazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering; and instead of always fixing our thoughts upon the points in which our literature is strong, we should, from time to time, fix them upon those in which it is weak. In France, the Academy serves as a sort of centre and rallying-point to educated opinion, and gives it a force which it has not got here. In the bulk of the intellectual work of a nation which has no centre, no intellectual metropolis like an academy, there is observable a note of provinciality. Great powers of mind will make a man think profoundly, but not even great powers of mind will keep his taste and style perfectly sound and sure if he is left too much to himself with no sovereign organ of opinion near him. Even men like Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer here. Theirs is too often extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices; prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste; prose with the note of provinciality; Asiatic prose, somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded. The note of provinciality in Addison is to be found in the commonplace of his ideas, though his style is classical. Where there is no centre like an academy, if you have genius and powerful ideas, you are apt not to have the best style going; if you have precision of style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas going.