The supreme excellence of the ancient Architecture the last particular to be touched, I shall not enlarge upon, because it has never once been called in question, and because it is abundantly testified by the awful ruins of amphitheatres, aqueducts, arches, and columns, that are the daily objects of veneration, though not of imitation. This art, it is observable; has never been improved in later ages in one single instance; but every just and legitimate edifice is still formed according to the five old established orders, to which human wit has never been able to add a sixth of equal symmetry and strength. Such, therefore, are the triumphs of the Ancients, especially the Greeks, over the Moderns. They may, perhaps, be not unjustly ascribed to a genial climate, that gave such a happy temperament of body as was most proper to produce fine sensations; to a language most harmonious, copious, and forcible; to the public encouragements and honours bestowed on the cultivators of literature; to the emulation excited among the generous youth, by exhibitions of their performances at the solemn games; to an inattention to the arts of lucre and commerce, which engross and debase the minds of the moderns; and above all, to an exemption from the necessity of overloading their natural faculties with learning and languages, with which we in these later times are obliged to qualify ourselves, for writers, if we expect to be read. It is said by Voltaire, with his usual liveliness, "We shall never again behold the time, when a Duke de la Rochefoucault might go from the conversation of a Pascal or Arnauld, to the theatre of Corneille." This reflection may be more justly applied to the ancients, and it may with much greater truth be said; "The age will never again return, when a Pericles, after walking with Plato in a portico, built by Phidias, and painted by Apelles, might repair to hear a pleading of Demosthenes, or a tragedy of Sophocles." I shall next examine the other part of Addison's assertion, that the moderns excell the ancients in all the arts of Ridicule, and assign the reasons of this supposed excellence. No. CXXXIII. Tuesday, February 12. 1754. _At nostri proavi Plautinos et numeros et Laudeveres sales; nimium patienter utrumque, Ne dicam stule, mirati; si modo ego et vos Scimus inurbanum lepido seponere dicto_. HOR. "And yet our fires with joy could Plautus hear; Gay were his jests, his numbers charm'd their ear." Let me not say too lavishly they prais'd; But sure their judgment was full cheaply pleas'd, If you or I with taste are haply blest, To know a clownish from a courtly jest. FRANCIS.