Men felt that it was a great age, comparable to the age of Augustus, and few would have preferred to have lived at any other time.

Their literary artists, Corneille, and then Racine and Moliere, appealed so strongly to their taste that they could not assign to them any rank but the first.

They were impatient of the claims to unattainable excellence advanced for the Greeks and Romans.

"The ancients," said Moliere, "are the ancients, we are the people of to-day." This might be the motto of Descartes, and it probably expressed a very general feeling.
It was in 1687 that Charles Perrault--who is better remembered for his collection of fairy-tales than for the leading role which he played in this controversy--published his poem on "The Age of Louis the Great." The enlightenment of the present age surpasses that of antiquity,--this is the theme.
La docte Antiquite dans toute sa duree A l'egal de nos jours ne fut point eclairee.
Perrault adopts a more polite attitude to "la belle antiquite" than Saint Sorlin, but his criticism is more insidious.

Greek and Roman men of genius, he suggests, were all very well in their own times, and might be considered divine by our ancestors.