Its meetings are held every Friday evening, and
the members, as at the institute at Paris, read their own papers. A few
nights ago, at a meeting of this academy, I heard a memoir from the pen
of the professor of botany, in which he dwelt at large upon the family
of the lilies, but prized and praised them for nothing so much as for
their connection with the Bourbon family. I mention the fact to shew you
how readily the French seize hold of every occasion of displaying their
devotion to the powers that be. In 1814, at the moment of the
restoration of Louis XVIIIth, we were not surprised to see every town
and village between Calais and Paris, decorated with a proud display of
the busts of the monarch, the shields of France and Navarre, and
innumerable devices and mottoes, _consecrated_, as the French say, to
the Bourbons; but four years have given time for this ebullition of
loyalty to subside; and the introduction of such topics at the present
day, and especially in the meetings of a body devoted solely to the
improvement of literature and of the arts and sciences, appears to savor
somewhat of adulation.
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