moderns. This raving upon antiquity in matter of poetry, Horace has wittily described and exposed in one of his satires.[1] The same sort of madness may be found in reference to all the other sciences. Some will not admit an opinion not authorized by men of old, who were then all giants in knowledge. Nothing is to be put into the treasury of truth or knowledge which has not the stamp of Greece or Rome upon it, and since their days will scarce allow that men have been able to see, think, or write. Others, with a like extravagancy, contemn all that the ancients have left us, and being taken with the modern inventions and discoveries, lay by all that went before, as if whatever is called old must have the decay of time upon it, and truth too were liable to mold and rottenness.[2]
- ↑ Satires. The passage here referred to is probably from the “Epistles” of Horace, Bk. II. Epistle L A portion of Creech’s
translation reads as follows :
“If length of time will better verse like wine,
Give it a brisker taste, and make it fine;
Come tell me then, I would be gladly showed,
How many years will make a poem good:
One poet writ an hundred years ago,
What, is he old, and therefore famed, or no?
Or is he new, and therefore bold appears?
Let's fix upon a certain term of years. He's good that lived an hundred years ago,
Another wants but one, is he so too?
Or is he new, and damned for that alone?
Well, he's good too, and old that wants but one.
And thus I'll argue on, and bate one more,
And so by one and one waste all the store;
And so confute him, who esteems by years,
A poem’s goodness from the date it bears,
Who not admires, nor yet approves a line,But what ia old, and death hath made divine.” - ↑ Mold and rottenness. Cf. Bacon, “Novum Organum,” Bk. I. Aph, 56: “There are found some minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an extreme love and appetite for novelty; but few so duly tempered that they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid down by the ancients, nor despising what is well introduced by the moderns. This however turns to the great injury of the sciences and philosophy; since these affectations of antiquity and novelty are the humors of partisans rather than judgments; and truth is to be sought for not in the felicity of any age, which is an unstable thing, but in the light of nature and experience, which is eternal. These factions therefore must be abjured, and care must be taken that the intellect be not hurried by them into assent.” Cf. also Bk. I. Aph. 84.
