These ideas were in the air.  Another Frenchman, the classical scholar, Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of the Things in the Universe. [Footnote:  De la vicissitude ou variete des choses en l’univers, 1577, 2nd ed. (which I have used), 1584.] It contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity, and it anticipates later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science, philosophy, and the arts.  Beginning with the advance of man from primitive rudeness to ordered society—­a sketch based on the conjectures of Plato in the Protagoras—­Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates the merits, of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans and Saracens, and finally of the modern age.  The facts, he thinks, establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence, philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and decline together.

But they do decline.  Human things are not perpetual; all pass through the same cycle—­beginning, progress, perfection, corruption, end.  This, however, does not explain the succession of empires in the world, the changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples to another.  Le Roy finds the cause in providential design.  God, he believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to Europe, again to Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance travel from country to country, that all in their turn may share in good and bad fortune, and none become too proud through prolonged prosperity.

But what of the modern age in Western Europe?  It is fully the equal, he assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some respects it is superior.  Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts of antiquity, which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been restored, and there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner’s compass, and “I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race.”  In our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we surpass the ancients.”  We can affirm that the whole world is now known, and all the races of men; they can interchange all their commodities and mutually supply their needs, as inhabitants of the same city or world-state.”  And hence there has been a notable increase of wealth.