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.