This museum is a recent erection:  most, if not all, of the departments of France, possess similar establishments in their principal towns.  The basis of the collection is founded upon the plunder of the suppressed monasteries; but M. Descamps told us that, in the course of a journey to Italy, he had been the means of adding to this, at Rouen, its principal ornaments.  He had the greater merit of preserving it entire, when orders were transmitted from Paris to send off its best pictures, to replace those taken from the Louvre by the allies; for on all occasions, whether great or small, the interests 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.