opened the campaign. Saint Sorlin had become a fanatical Christian;
that was one reason for hating the ancients. [Footnote: For the
views of Saint Sorlin see the Preface to his Clovis and his Traite
pour juger des poefes grecs, latins, et francais, chap. iv. (1670).
Cp. Rigault, Hist. de la querelle, p. 106. The polemic of Saint
Sorlin extended over about five years (1669-73).] He was also, like
Boisrobert, a bad poet; that was another. His thesis was that the
history of Christianity offered subjects far more inspiring to a
poet than those which had been treated by Homer and Sophocles, and
that Christian poetry must bear off the palm from pagan. His own
Clovis and Mary Magdalene or the Triumph of Grace were the
demonstration of Homer's defeat. 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. Here we have both the
assertion of the permanence of the forces of nature and the idea,
already expressed by Bacon and others, that the modern age has