Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/20

xii Academy. Some one pointed out that Perrault had omitted Boileau's name from his poem, although he mentioned a large number of other French authors as the equals in genius of the ancients. Angered at the wrong done to his favourite authors, Boileau wrote bitterly against Perrault and his friends, and furious war raged between the advocates of the ancients and the advocates of the moderns.

A year before Perrault's poem was read, Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686), had thrown out certain disrespectful insinuations touching the ancients, and a year after Perrault's poem had convulsed literary France, he again set forward his views in his Poésies Pastorales: Avec un Traité sur la Nature de l'Eglogue, et une Digression sur les Anciens et [sur] les Modernes (1688). In the Traité Fontenelle examines in some detail the pastoral poems of Vergil, of Theocritus, and of other pastoral poets, and comes to the conclusion 'entre la grossièreté ordinaire des bergers de Théocrite, et le trop d'esprit de la plupart de nos bergers modernes, il y a un milieu à tenir.' His own pastorals, printed in the same volume, are intended to show where the via media lies. The