The schoolmen cannot have very fine noses if they are not disgusted with the noise which Polyphemus makes when he has eaten heartily.
They say that the Athenian pit laughed at this pleasantry, and that the Athenians never laughed at anything stupid. So the whole populace of Athens had more wit than the court of Louis XIV., and the populace are not the same everywhere!
Nevertheless, Euripides has beauties, and Sophocles still more; but they have much greater defects. We may venture to say that the fine scenes of Corneille and the affecting tragedies of Racine are as much superior to the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, as these two Greeks were to Thespis. Racine was quite sensible of his great superiority over Euripides, but he praised the Greek poet for the sake of humbling Perrault.
Molière, in his best pieces, is as superior to the pure but cold Terence, and to the buffoon Aristophanes, as to the merry-andrew Dancourt.
Thus there are things in which the moderns are superior to the ancients; and others, though very few, in which we are their inferiors. The whole of the dispute reduces itself to this fact.
Certain Comparisons between Celebrated Works.
Both taste and reason seem to require that we should, in an ancient as well as in a modern, discriminate between the good and the bad that are often to be found in contact with each other.
The warmest admiration must be excited by that line of Corneille's, unequalled by any in Homer, in Sophocles, or in Euripides:
Que vouliez-vous qu'il fût contre trois?—Qu'il mourût.
What could he do against three weapons?—Die.
And, with equal justice, the line that follows will be condemned.