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164 at this idea of an academy. But for the death of King James I., the scheme of Edmund Bolton, which was to establish an order of men of science and literature, and to subordinate it to the Order of the Garter, would probably have been carried through. A similar scheme was set on foot by Dryden and Roscommon; and another by Swift and Harley. Yet nothing was done. The Seventeenth Century incorporated the sciences, and the Eighteenth Century founded an academy of the fine arts; the Nineteenth Century did not complete their work by founding an academy of letters. Macaulay, in the last year of his life, spent an afternoon in drawing up a list of forty names for an imaginary English academy; but the forty are now dead, and the academy is yet to build. What Johnson has to say on the question he says in his Life of Roscommon:—