ABSTRACT
I have seen letters decline and finally fall into an almost complete decadence, for I know no one today who can be called truly learned … The ignorant and unlettered … have undertaken to make a merit of their incapacity, to ridicule erudition, and to treat of science merely as pedantry … To decry the study of antiquity, they have decried the merit of the ancients, of whom they are ignorant and have preferred to it that of the moderns, that is to say, their own … I can thus say that I have seen letters flourish and die and that I have survived them.
