of the departments are sacrificed without
mercy to the engulphing capital. Descamps was firm in defending his
trust: he resisted the spoliation, upon the principle that the museum
was the private property of the town; and the plea was admitted.

The same conventual buildings also contain the rooms appropriated to the
use of the academy at Rouen, a royal institution of old standing, and
which has published fifteen volumes of its transactions.--It was
founded in 1744, under a charter granted to the Duke of Luxembourg, then
governor of the province, and its first president. The present
complement of members consists of forty-six fellows, besides
non-resident associates. 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. These praises excited no remarks and no
criticisms; though both might have been expected; for, during the
reading of a paper, the by-standers are allowed to discuss its merits
and its defects. This practice gives the sittings of a French literary
society a degree of life and spirit wanting to ours in England; but I
doubt if the advantage be not more than counter-balanced by the
frequent interruptions which it occasions, and which an ill-natured
person might in some cases suspect to proceed from a desire of
attracting notice, rather than from fair, and just reprehension. I
should be sorry to insinuate that any thing of this kind was evident at
the time, just a