Proofread and pages added by Jonathan Perry, March 2001. Mankind has always maintained that the good old times were much better than the present day. Posterity has well avenged Achilles for Nestor's poor compliment.
Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity.
In the event that they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot be equalled in these latter centuries. With the illustrious academician's permission, that is not at all the state of the question. Further, it is possible that the government of Athens, by seconding the climate, put into Demosthenes' head something that the air of Clamart and La Grenouillere and the government of Cardinal de Richelieu did not put into the heads of Omer Talon and Jerome Bignon. This dispute is therefore a question of fact. The Chinese, more than two hundred years before our era, constructed that great wall which was not able to save them from the invasion of the Tartars.