Page:An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.djvu/113

 agreeable enthusiasm, tinctures not only their manners, but their learning, and taste. While we with a despondence characteristic of our nation, are for removing back British excellence to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, our more happy rivals of the continent, cry up the writers of the present times with rapture, and regard the age of Lewis XV. as the true Augustan age of France.

truth is, their present writers have not fallen so far short of the merits of their ancestors, as ours have done. That self-sufficiency, now mentioned, may have been of service to them in this particular. By fancying themselves superior to their ancestors, they have been encouraged to enter the lists with confidence, and by not being dazled at the splendor of ano-