Thus the gauntlet was flung—­and it is important to note this—­ before the appearance of the Discourse of Method (1637); but the influence of Descartes made itself felt throughout the controversy, and the most prominent moderns were men who had assimilated Cartesian ideas.  This seems to be true even of Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, who, a good many years after the discourse of Boisrobert, 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 advantages over antiquity comparable to those of old age over childhood.

2.

How seriously the question between the Moderns and the Ancients—­on whose behalf Boileau had come forward and crossed swords with Saint Sorlin—­was taken is shown by the fact that Saint Sorlin, before his death, solemnly bequeathed the championship of the Moderns to a younger man, Charles Perrault.  We shall see how he fulfilled the trust.  It is illustrated too by a book which appeared in the seventies, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et Eugene, by Bouhours, a mundane and popular Jesuit Father.  In one of these dialogues the question is raised, but with a curious caution and evasiveness, which suggests that