The literary prizes were distributed by M. Villemain.  The grand prize of ten thousand francs for the best work on the history of France, was given to Augustin Thierry.  Emile Angier received a prize of seven thousand francs for his comedy of “Gabrielle,” and M. Antran one of three thousand for his “Daughter of AEsehylus.”  Three ladies got prizes worth two thousand francs each for works of a popular nature on moral subjects; M. A. Garnier got one of one thousand for his Morale Sociale; M. Martin the same for his Philosophie Spiritualiste de la Nature, and M. Kastus the same for his Psycologie d’Aristote.  The crown for the best specimen of eloquence was awarded to M. Baudrillast for his Eulogy on Madame de Stael, in which the literary history and character of the subject were served up in the most florid style.  The same writer once before won the same prize by a eulogy on Turgot.  His productions are more elaborate and showy than substantial and permanent in their character.

It must be said that this Academy is rather a respectable and slow-moving institutution.  The most illustrious names of France are not always included in the list of its members.  Neither Beranger nor Lamenais belong to it.  A writer in the Paris National says that after three hours at its meeting everybody he met in the street seemed to belong to the time of Louis XI.

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EDWARD EVERETT has been many years engaged in the collection and arrangement of materials for a systematic Treatise on the Modern Law of Nations; more especially in reference to those questions which nave been discussed between the governments of the United States and Europe since the Peace of 1783.  This will be Mr. Everett’s “life poem.”  Hitherto he has written nothing very long except the “Defense of the Christian Religion,” published when he was about twenty-one years of age.  We have just received from Little & Brown their edition of the “Orations and Speeches” of Mr. Everett, in two very large and richly-printed volumes, which we shall hereafter notice more largely.  These are to be followed, at the author’s leisure, by his Political Reports and Speeches and Official Papers, in two large volumes, and his contributions to the North American Review, which, if all included, we think will make four others:  so that his works, beside the new treatise above mentioned, will be completed in not less than eight volumes.  We are gratified at the prospect of such a collection of these masterpieces of rhetoric, so full of learning and wisdom, and infused by so genial a spirit.  We wish some publisher would give us in the same style all the writings of Alexander Everett.

CHARLES MACKAY has lately published in London, a work upon which he had long been engaged, under the title of “Progress of the Intellect.”  We suspect, from the reviewals of it which appear in the journals, that it is of the German free thinking class of philosophical histories.  It embraces dissertations on Intellectual Religion, Ancient Cosmogony, the Metaphysical Idea of God, the Moral Notion of God, the Theory of Mediation, Hebrew Theory of Retribution and Immortality, the Messianic Theory prevailing in the days of Jesus, Christian Forms and Reforms, and Speculative Christianity.  And these dissertations are written with an eloquence and power unexampled in a work of so much learning.