own that I consider myself fortunate to know the happiness we enjoy;
it is a great pleasure to survey all the past ages in which I can
see the birth and the progress of all things, but nothing which has
not received a new increase and lustre in our own times. Our age
has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection. And since
for some years the rate of the progress is much slower and appears
almost insensible--as the days seem to cease lengthening when the
solstice is near--it is pleasant to think that probably there are
not many things for which we need envy future generations."

Indifference to the future, or even a certain scepticism about it,
is the note of this passage, and accords with the view that the
world has reached its old age. The idea of the progress of
knowledge, which Perrault expounds, is still incomplete.

3.

Independently of this development in France, the doctrine of
degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the ancients
with the moderns incidentally raised, in England.

A divine named George Hakewill published in 1627 a folio of six
hundred pages to confute "the common error touching Nature's
perpetual and universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or
Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of
the World, consisting in an Examination and Censure of the common
Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).] He and his pedantic book, which
breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, are completely
forgotten; and though it ran to three editions, it can hardly have
attracted the attention of many except theologians. The writer's