He might be answered thus: _Esteem_ your ancestors, without _adoring_ them. You have intelligence and powers of invention, as Virgil and Horace had; but perhaps it is not absolutely the same intelligence. Perhaps their talents were superior to--yours; they exercised them, too, in a language richer and more harmonious than our modern tongues, which are a mixture of corrupted Latin, with the horrible jargon of the Celts. Nature is not capricious; but it is possible that she had given the Athenians a soil and sky better adapted than Westphalia and the Limousin to the formation of geniuses of a certain order. It is also likely that, the government of Athens, seconding the favorable climate, put ideas into the head of Demosthenes which the air of Clamar and La Grenouillere combined with the government of Cardinal de Richelieu, did _not_ put into the heads of Omer Talon and Jerome Bignon. Some one answered La Motte's lines by the following: _Cher la Motte, imite et revère_ _Ces Dieux dont tu ne descends pas;_ _Si tu crois qu'Horace est ton père,_ _Il a fait des enfans ingrats._ _La nature n'est point bizarre;_ _Pour Danchet elle est fort avare,_ _Mais Racine en fut bien traité;_ _Tibulle était guide par elle,_ _Mais pour notre ami La Chapelle,_ _Hélas! qu'elle a peu de bonté!_ Revere and imitate, La Motte, Those Gods from whom thou'rt _not_ descended; If thou by Horace _wert_ begot, His children's manners might be mended. Nature is not at all capricious; To Danchet she is avaricious, But she was liberal to Racine; She used Tibullus very well, Though to our good friend La Chapelle, Alas! she is extremely mean! This dispute, then, resolves itself into a question of fact. Was antiquity more fertile in great monuments of genius of every kind, down to the time of Plutarch, than modern ages have been, from that of the house of Medicis to that of Louis XIV., inclusively? The Chinese, more than two hundred years before our Christian era, built their great wall, which could not save them from invasion by the Tartars. The Egyptians had, four thousand years before, burdened the earth with their astonishing pyramids, the bases of which covered ninety thousand square feet. No one doubts that, if it were thought advisable to undertake such useless works at the present day, they might be accomplished by lavishing plenty of money. The great wall of China is a monument of fear; the pyramids of Egypt are monuments of vanity and superstition; both testify the great patience of the two people, but no superior genius. Neither the Chinese nor the Egyptians could have made a single statue like those formed by our living sculptors.