"SIR,--The essay you propound concerning the ancient and modern learning were not difficult to make; but I think you are better qualified for such an undertaking than I, and therefore shall refer it to you. In summe the ancients excel the moderns in nothing but acuteness of wit and elegancy of language in all their writings, in their poetry and oratory. As for painting and sculpture, and musick and architecture, some of the moderns I think do equal, if not excel, the best of them, not in the theory only, but also in the practice of those arts: Neither do we give place to them in politicks or morality; but in natural history and experimental philosophy we far transcend them. In the purely mathematical sciences, abstracted from matter, as geometry and arithmetick, we may vie with them, as also in history; but in astronomy, geography, and chronology, we excel them much. No wonder they should outstrip us in those arts which are conversant in polishing and adorning their language, because they bestowed all their time and pains in cultivating of them, and had but one, and that their native tongue, to mind. But those arts are by wise men censured, as far inferior to the study of things, words being but the pictures of things; and to be wholly occupied about them, is to fall in love with a picture, and neglect the life; and oratory, which is the best of these arts, is but a kind of voluptuary one, like cookery, which sophisticates meats, and cheats the palate, spoiling wholsome viands, and helping unwholsome."