Voltaire, in his
"Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the
well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign
countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of
the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names
of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I
have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two
or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and
scurrilous party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who
replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been
very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and
that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men
of greater talents. He granted also that men of true genius and literary
eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character
than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He
added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a
literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from
that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.

To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted
to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal. Some he has made tribunes,
prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in
foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given
places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of
this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a
De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our
literature and honours to our nation. This liberality is often carried
too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery
displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To
a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the
First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that
ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a
place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve
thousand livres in the year--besides a present, in ready money, of one
hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and
sung the chiefs of all former facti