[Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English, French and German always, Italian, even Spanish to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves — and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the "modern" advocates in the Quarrel — that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.
George Saintsbury, (1904) A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (vol.3) Aqui.
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