he announced a metaphysical discovery he showed his understanding
of the principle by making his exposition--strange as the proceeding
appears to us--as short and as clear as the most admirable literary
skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of
the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the
famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the
Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In England
the most familiar outcome was Swift's _Battle of the Books_, in which he
struck out the famous phrase about sweetness and light, 'the two noblest
of things'; which he illustrated by ridiculing Bentley's criticism and
Dryden's poetry. I may take for granted the motives which induced that
generation to accept as their models the great classical masterpieces,
the study of which had played so important a part in the revival of
letters and the new philosophy. I may perhaps note, in passing, that we
do not always remember what classical literature meant to that
generation. In the first place, the education of a gentleman meant
nothing then except a certain drill in Greek and Latin--whereas now it
includes a little dabbling in other branches of knowledge. In the next
place, if a man had an appetite for literature, what else was he to
read? Imagine every novel, poem, and essay written during the last two
centuries to be obliterated and further, the literature of the early
seventeenth century and all that went before to be regarded as pedantic
and obsolete, the field of study would be so limited that a man would be
forced in spite of himself to read his _Homer_ and _Virgil_. The vice of
pedantry was not very accurately defined--sometimes it is the ancient,
sometimes the modern, who appears to be pedantic. Still, as in the
_Battle of the Books_ controversy, the general opinion seems to be that
the critic should have before him the great classical models, and regard
the English literature of the seventeenth century as a collection of all
possible errors of taste. When, at the end of this period, Swift with
Pope formed the project of the Scriblerus Club, its aim was to be a
joint-stock satire against all 'false tastes' in learning, art, and
science. That was the characteristic conception of the most brilliant
men of letters of the time.

Here, then, we have the general indication of the composition of the
literary organ. It is made up of men of the world--'Wit