uch great
personages as Dryas, Cenaeus, Exadius, Polyphemus equal to the gods,
etc."

Posterity has well avenged Achilles for Nestor's poor compliment. Nobody
knows Dryas any longer; one has hardly heard speak of Exadius, or of
Cenaeus; and as for Polyphemus equal to the gods, he has not too good a
reputation, unless the possession of a big eye in one's forehead, and
the eating of men raw, are to have something of the divine.

Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II.
v. 1159). Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote
antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force
in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus (Epist. I. liv. ii.). "Must our
poems, then," he says, "be like our wines, of which the oldest are
always preferred?"

The learned and ingenious Fontenelle expresses himself on this subject
as follows:

"The whole question of the pre-eminence between the ancients and the
moderns, once it is well understood, is reduced to knowing whether the
trees which formerly were in our countryside were bigger than those of
to-day. In the event that they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot
be equalled in these latter centuries.

"Let us throw light on this paradox. If the ancients had more intellect
than us, it is that the brains of those times were better ordered,
formed of firmer or more delicate fibres, filled with more animal
spirits; but in virtue of what were the brains of those times better
ordered? The trees also would have been bigger and more beautiful; for
if nature was then younger and more vigorous, the trees, as well as
men's brains, would have been conscious of this vigour and this youth."
("Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns," vol. 4, 1742 edition.)

With the illustrious academician's permission, that is not at all the
state of the question. It is not a matter of knowing whether nature has
been able to produce in our day as great geniuses and as good works as
those of Greek and Latin antiquity; but to know whether we have them in
fact. Without a doubt it is not impossible for there to be as big oaks
in the forest of Chantilli as in the forest of Dodona; but supposing
that the oaks of Dodona had spoken, it would be quite clear that they
had a great advantage over ours, which in all probability will never
speak.

Nature is not bizarre; but it is possible that she gave the Athenians a
country and a sky more suitable than Westphalia and the