THE NEW FRENCH ACADEMICIAN.

No institution of its kind holds so eminent a place in the esteem of a great country as the Academie Francaise.  The elections are always a matter of interest, largely shared by the cultivated Revue-des-Deux-Mondes-reading world of both hemispheres; and the last election was one which excited fully as much attention as most of its predecessors.  M. John Lemoinne, who at length summoned up courage to present himself as a candidate, was born in London in Waterloo year, 1815, and has for a long period, probably thirty years, been, through the Journal des Debats, in some sort a European power.  His selection to fill the seat of M. Jules Janin is in every way appropriate.  Indeed, it seems strange that he should have been contented to wait until he was sixty-one to come forward for that distinction.

The foundation of the Academy is directly traceable to the meetings of men of science at the house of M. Courart—­who, early in the seventeenth century, was for forty years its first secretary—­but it unquestionably owes to Richelieu a habitation and a name.  It was formed with the special object of preserving accuracy in the French language, to which Frenchmen have been wont to pay an almost exclusive attention, but by the election of M. Lemoinne the Academy will have at least one member who is no less acquainted with another tongue.

Every one will remember old Miss Crawley’s rage when she found that Becky was trading on her connection with the democratic-aristocratic spinster to make her way into the Faubourg St. Germain.  Too impatient to write in French, the old lady posted off a furious disavowal of the little adventuress in vigorous vernacular, but, adds the author, as Madame la Duchesse had only passed twenty years in England, she didn’t understand one word.  It may be hoped that the new Academician will, in conjunction with the new minister of public instruction, Mr. Waddington, who is a Rugby and Cambridge man, have some effect in arousing his countrymen to the study which they have heretofore so strangely neglected of a tongue which threatens to obliterate in time the inconveniences occasioned by the Tower of Babel.  English is every day more and more spoken, and French less and less.

In delivering his address of welcome to M. Lemoinne, M. Cavillier Fleury said:  “You are one of the creators of the discussion of foreign affairs in the French papers:  you gave them the taste for interesting themselves in the concerns of foreign countries.  Few of us before steam had shortened distance really knew England.  Voltaire had by turns glorified and ridiculed it; De Stael had shown it to us in an agreeable book; the witty letters of Duvergier de Hauranne had revealed the secrets of its electoral system.  Your correspondence of 1841 completed the work.”  He might pertinently have added, “Because you are about the only French newspaper writer who ever thoroughly understood the English language, and could thus avoid ridiculous blunders.”