Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1884 — Official Encouragement of Talent. [ARTICLE]

Official Encouragement of Talent.

A fact noticed in the Belgian correspondence of one of the Parisian papers affords another illustration of the inefficacy of the official encouragement of talent by the state. The Kong of the Belgians has regularly offered every year, for the last ten years, a prize of £I,OOO for the best work on some subject of general interest, the greatest latitude of choice being allowed the candidates, provided the work came witffin the sufficiently comprehensive category of “oeuvres d’intelligence. ” During the whole ten years the prize has only been awarded once! Year after year the jury appointed to decide on the merits of the different essays sent in have had to make the melancholy return that not one of them cam® up to a decent standard. Macaulay (himself a writer of prize poems) has somewhere said that prize sheep are only fit to make candles of, and prize poems to light them with. Young Oxford would probably object to the dictum; but in Belgium, if prize essays and prize poems may be placed on the same footing, it would seem to be in part true.— Pall Mall Gazette.