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.  It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents “may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other countries or times.  May not the same have happened in the production, growth, and size of wit and genius in the world, or in some parts or ages of it, and from many more circumstances that contributed towards it than what may concur to the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?”] And it must be confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the answer which it provoked from Wotton.  For Wotton had a far wider range of knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in knowledge of antiquity he was Fontenelle’s superior.  His inquiry stands out as the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the whole debate.  He accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle “as to the comparative force of the geniuses of men in the several ages of the world and of the equal force of men’s understandings absolutely considered in all times since learning first began to be cultivated amongst mankind.”  But this is not incompatible with the thesis that in some branches the ancients excelled all who came after them.  For it is not necessary to explain such excellence by the hypothesis that there was a particular force of genius evidently discernible in former ages, but extinct long since, and that nature is now worn out and spent.  There is an alternative explanation.  There may have been special circumstances “which might suit with those ages which did exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did exceed us, and with no other age nor thing besides.”