of Grace were the demonstration of
Homer's defeat. Few have ever heard of these productions; how many have
read them? Curiously, about the same time an epic was being composed
in England which might have given to the foolish contentions of Saint
Sorlin some illusory plausibility.

But the literary dispute does not concern us here. What does concern
us is that Saint Sorlin was aware of the wider aspects of the question,
though he was not seriously interested in them. Antiquity, he says, was
not so happy or so learned or so rich or so stately as the modern age,
which is really the mature old age, and as it were the autumn of the
world, possessing the fruits and the spoils of all the past centuries,
with the power to judge of the inventions, experiences, and errors of
predecessors, and to profit by all that. The ancient world was a spring
which had only a few flowers. Nature indeed, in all ages, produces
perfect works but it is not so with the creations of man, which require
correction; and the men who live latest must excel in happiness and
knowledge. Here we have both the assertion of the permanence of the
forces of nature and the idea, already expressed by Bacon and others,
that the modern age has advantages over antiquity comparable to those of
old age over childhood.

2.

How seriously the question between the Moderns and the Ancients--on
whose behalf Boileau had come forward and crossed swords with Saint
Sorlin--was taken is shown by the fact that Saint Sorlin, before his
death, solemnly bequeathed the championship of the Moderns to a younger
man, Charles Perrault. We shall see how he fulfilled the trust. It
is illustrated too by a book which appeared in the seventies, Les
Entretiens d'Ariste et Eugene, by Bouhours, a mundane and popular Jesuit
Father. In one of these dialogues the question is raised, but with a
curious caution and evasiveness, which suggests that the author was
afraid to commit himself; he did not wish to make enemies. [Footnote:
Rigault notes that he makes one contribution to the subject, the idea
that the torch of civilisation has passed from country to country, in
different ages, e.g. from Greece to Rome, and recently from Italy to
France. In the last century the Italians were first in doctrine and
politesse. The present century is for France what the last was for
Italy: "We have all the esprit and all the science, all other countries
are barbarous in comparison" (p. 239, ed. 1782, Amsterdam)