For two hundred years the great dispute had been going on as to the comparative superiority of the works of ancient and modern literature. It had occupied the minds of Corneille and Racine; it had produced the earliest translations of Greek and Roman poetry; and it had by slow degrees led the modern mind to recover its self-confidence, after the first overpowering impression of the grandeur of ancient literature had worn off. It was this two hundred years' long discussion which Chateaubriand revived in a new form, namely, as the question of the value of the Christian religion to poetry and the arts, compared with that of the old mythologies. In the most remarkable manner he ignores the fact that the great question in the case of a religion is not whether or in what degree it is poetical, but whether it has the truth on its side or not. Very remarkable, too, are the arguments to which he has recourse to support his assertions! He vaunts, for example, the æsthetic superiority of the Christian hell to the heathen Tartarus. Is it not infinitely grander--"poetry of torture, hymns of flesh and blood"? He poetically jingles hell's instruments of torture, employs them as æsthetic rattles for the old, dull children of the new century, and brings into fashion a sort of drawing-room Christianity, specially adapted to the requirements of the_ blasés_ upper classes of France. In the seventeenth century men believed in Christianity, in the eighteenth they renounced and extirpated it, and now, in the nineteenth, the kind of piety was coming into vogue which consisted in looking at it pathetically, gazing at it from the outside, as one looks at an object in a museum, and saying: How poetic! how touching! how beautiful! Fragments from the ruins of monasteries were set up in gardens, with a figure dressed as a hermit guarding them; a gold cross was once more thought a most becoming ornament for a fashionable lady; the audiences at sacred concerts melted into tears. Men were touched by the thought of all the comfort religion affords to the poor and the suffering. They had lost the simple faith of olden days and now clung to externals, to the significance of the Catholic church in literature and art, its influence on society and the state. To make the antiquated principle of authority look young and attractive they painted it with the rouge of sentimental enthusiasm; but they only succeeded in making the principle that had once been so awe-inspiring, ridiculous. Constant wrote his book on religion in the house of his friend, Madame de Charrière, Chateaubriand wrote his in the companionship of his devoted and intimate friend, Madame de Beaumont, who assisted him by searching for the quotations he required. His mind does not seem to have been taken up with his work to the exclusion of all mundane thoughts.