Page:Reflections upon ancient and modern learning (IA b3032449x).pdf/92

 than omitted them because of the Roughness of the Manners of the Ages in which they lived. Ovid and Tibullus knew what Love was, in its tenderest Motions; they describe its Anxieties and Disappointments in a Manner that raises too too many Passions, even in unconcerned Hearts; they omit no probable Arts of Courtship and Address; and keeping the Mark they aim at still in view, they rather chuse to shew their Passion, than their Wit: And therefore they are not so formal as the Heroes in Pharamond or Cassandra; who, by pretending to Exactness in all their Methods, commit greater Improbabilities than Amadis de Gaule himself. In short, Durse (e), and Calprenede (f), and the rest of them, by over-straining the String, have broke it: And one can as soon believe that Varillas and Maimbourg wrote the Histories of great Actions just as they were done, as that Men ever made Love in such a Way as these Love-and-Honour Men describe. That Simplicity therefore of the Ancients, which Monsieur Perrault undervalues, is so far from being a Mark of Rudeness, and Want of Complaisance, that their Fault lay in being too Natural, in making too lively Descriptions of Things, where Men want no Foreign Assistance to help