in arms: now they have conquered thee in eloquence!'

These few instances, among many that occur to me, prove that the ancients possessed every merit that has been attributed to them, and shew that the greatest effort of the human mind is to rise superior to envy.
The influence of this fiend, however, lay only dormant till the inestimable works of these great men were universally diffused. The moment that opportunity occurred, she shook off her torpor, awoke, walked abroad, and looked so terrible, that modest reason sighed, blushed, and retired.

To be plain. It is remarkable that the more modern we get, the more the number of cavillers increases; and, really, as cavilling is a very ungracious thing, this is lucky for them; both because the task becomes every day more and more difficult, and because the dunces become every day more and more stupid. Thus the labour, by being given into so many hands, is infinitely less tremendous.
The quantum of abuse must be always the same, and how hard it is to fall to the lot of one man, wholly to employ himself in searching out the faults of his neighbour, when, by an honest appropriation of his time, he might manifest some perfection of his own. This feat of hardihood, however, we see Milbourn, almost single-handed, attempt against Dryden, though the portion of abuse is as great, and the quality as malevolent, as all that vast cargo of Grub-street filth with which Pope was bespattered, by all the heroes immortalized in the Dunciad; and, if we want a climax, we have nothing to do but look at that flock of critical crows

who, even yet, have not left off gorging on the literary carcase of Doctor Johnson.
But, if I were to go into that large field of observation which it would be necessary to traverse to get at the divers schisms that have, at times, distracted the state of literature, I should make it the field of battle between the moderns and the ancients. In France I should set Corneille and Racine against Sophocles and Euripides; Malherbe against Pindar; Moliere against Menander and Aristophanes, nay Plautus and Terence. The Countess De la Suse and Madame Dacier would pull caps with Sapho. In Italy, Petrarch and Guarini would attack Ovid and Tibullus; Tasso would menace to their teeth Homer and Virgil; Camoes, Lopez de Vega, Calderone, and Cervantes, would single out their respective antagonists, for the honour of Spain and Portugal; and I should involve literature in that chaos of prejudices and opinions