further regulations, as might be necessary to give full effect to the proposed institution. Acting under His Majesty's gracious and unsolicited commission, the provisional council of the Society employed their utmost diligence and circumspection to frame such regulations, as appeared to them best calculated to accomplish His Majesty's patriotic views, and to guard His truly royal munificence from misapplication and abuse. The provisional council having executed, to the best of their judgment, the commission thus graciously intrusted to them, the constitution and regulations of the Society were submitted to His Majesty on the 29th of last month, for His Majesty's final sanction. This sanction was signified under the sign manual, and in terms of the most entire approbation, on the 2nd instant. His Majesty's approbation of the Society under any form would have been a stimulus to our best exertions; but the royal endowment (which gives to the Society two gold medals of fifty guineas value each, to be adjudged annually to persons of eminent literary merit, in whatever country they may reside, and the nomination of ten associates, who are to have one hundred guineas each payable annually from the privy purse) holds out such rewards for past literary services to the public, as cannot fail to have a powerful influence on the rising generation. The Society, which has thus originated from the King, and has been formed under His Majesty's commission, we are here assembled this day to bring into public operation and activity, by the recital of the royal sanction, together with the constitution and regulations of the Society, and by the election of its council and officers for the ensuing year, thus, at length, under the authority of our royal founder and patron, giving to literature a corporate character and representation, which it possessed in almost every other country but our own; and which, in our own country, the sciences and the arts long since enjoyed, to the great encouragement and advancement of abstract and mechanical knowledge. That a Society of Literature should have been so long wanting in a country eminent for its works of history, poetry, and philology, cannot but excite surprise; but it is not surprising that it should have originated from a Sovereign, the most distinguished for his classical knowledge and taste since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It will be our imperative duty to do justice to His Majesty's magnificent design for the advancement of literature; and to promote his beneficent and patriotic views by our active co-ope ration, which we may effectually do, by a regular attendance at the meetings of the Society, by contribution to its literary stores, by soliciting communications from others who are not members of the Society, and by inviting men of learning and taste to join our ranks, and unite with us in the prosecution of a cause, which may, in many ways, conduce to the honor of our country, to the advancement of general learning, to the improvement of our language, to the correction of capricious deviations from its native purity, and (by the connexion, which the cultivation of the higher branches of literature has with every thing that is morally good in society) to the promotion of truth, of social order and loyalty,-loyalty in its genuine sense, not only of personal devotion to the Sovereign, but of attachment to the laws and institutions of our country. The interval, which will elapse between this day, and the month of November, may be most usefully employed in preparing materials of reading at our public meetings. Those materials will, by the constitution of our Society, not embrace questions of theology, or astronomy, or mathematics, or chemistry, or natural history, or music, or painting, or any questions peculiarly and specially professional. But the history of these and other branches of knowledge and art, and their general affinities, especially so far as they may have any bearing on subjects of classical inquiry, will by no means be foreign to our purpose. Our chief subjects, however, will be historic doubts and difficulties; important points of chronology and geography; unexplored portions of geography, especially of Greece and Palestine; the origin and progress of language in general, as well as of particular languages, especially of our own; the theory of grammar, and of prosody, and the critical improvement of our lexicography; illustrations of the poets, orators, and moralists of antiquity, and of our own great poets, from Chaucer to Milton; corrections of the texts of ancient writers, from manuscripts or conjecture; and notices of inedited works of antiquity. Communications on these and other subjects of general literature, whether original, by the members of the Society and by correspondents, or derived from the unpublished remains of our Langbaines, and Bentleys, and Porsons, and Burneys, and other eminent scholars, of which great stores are to be found in our public libraries, will be interesting and acceptable to the Society. CAMBRIDGE PRIZE POEMS, FOR 1823. In Obitum viri admodum reverendi doctissimique THOME Ναμάτων πάτες βαθύπλουτε Γάγγα, εὔῤῥοον ἱεῖς ! Oh sight of grief! the wives of Arvalan, Their widow robes of white, .... &c. See Southey's Curse of Kehama. Canto I. The Funeral. |