to the golden treasury for the young. When, fifteen or twenty years
after the earlier war, a new campaign began between the Ancients and
the Moderns, the philosophical discussion of the idea of progress
had separated itself from the literary quarrel. But in the tiltings
of Lamotte-Houdart, the champion of the moderns, against a
well-equipped female knight, the learned Madame Dacier--indignant
at Lamotte's _Iliade_, recast in the eighteenth-century taste--a new
question was raised, and one of significance for the eighteenth
century--that of the relative merits of prose and verse.

Lamotte, a writer of comedy, tragedy, opera, fables, eclogues, odes,
maintained that the highest literary form is prose, and he versified
none the less. The age was indeed an age of prose--an age when the
_salons_ discussed the latest discovery in science, the latest
doctrine in philosophy or politics. Its imaginative enthusiasm
passed over from art to speculation, and what may be called the poetry
of the eighteenth century is to be found less in its odes or dramas
or elegies than in the hopes and visions which gathered about that
idea of human progress emerging from a literary discussion, idle,
perhaps, in appearance, but in its inner significance no unfitting
inauguration of an era which looked to the future rather than to the
past.

BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757), a son of Corneille's
sister, whose intervention in the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns
turned the discussion in the direction of philosophy, belongs to both
the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the hundred years
which made up his life, there was indeed time for a second Fontenelle
to develop from the first. The first Fontenelle, satirised as the
Cydias of La Bruyere, "un compose du pedant et du precieux," was an
aspirant poet, without vision, without passion, who tried to
compensate his deficiencies by artificial elegances of style. The
origin of hissing is maliciously dated by Racine from his tragedy
_Aspar_. His operas fluttered before they fell; his _Eglogues_ had
not life enough to flutter. The _Dialogues des Morts_ (1683) is a
young writer's effort to be clever by paradox, an effort to show his
wit by incongruous juxtapositions, and a cynical levelling of great
reputations. But there was another Fontenelle, the untrammelled
disciple of Descartes, a man of universal interests, passionless,
but curious for all knowledge, an assimilator of new ideas, a