In describing Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M.de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part.

The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond's writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind of much cultivation and considerable common sense.

His judgement on Perrault's Parallel is that the author "has discovered the defects of the ancients better than he has made out the advantage of the moderns; his book is good and capable of curing us of abundance of errors." [Footnote: In a letter to the Duchess of Mazarin, Works, Eng.tr., iii.
418.] He was not a partisan.

But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited by the French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with greater courage than discretion.
Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain of Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be noted here is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's argument, that the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages the same.

"May there not," he asks, "many circumstances concur to one production that do not to any other in one or many ages ?" Fontenelle speaks of trees.