SOURCE: “Ancients and Moderns” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, edited by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, Cambridge University Press, pp. 32-71.

In following essay, Patey delineates the history of the English Battle of the Books and the French Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, arguing that the intellectual debate contributed to the development of literary criticism.

What the ancients have taught is so scanty and for the most part so lacking in credibility that I may not hope for any kind of approach toward truth except by rejecting all the paths which they have followed.

Descartes, Traité des passions de l'âme (1649)

It is the disease of the times, reigning in all places. New Sects: new religions: new philosophie: new methods: all new, till all be lost.

Meric Casaubon, Treatise concerning Enthusiasme (1656)

It has become...