༢༠༤༩

Phalaris he dwells with great warmth and with extraordinary
felicity of language. Indeed we could hardly select a more
favourable specimen of the graceful and easy majesty to which
his style sometimes rises than this unlucky passage. He knows,
he
says, that some learned men, or men who pass for learned,
such as Politian, have doubted the genuineness of these letters:
but of such doubts he speaks with the greatest contempt.
Now it is perfectly certain, first, that the letters are very bad;
secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether
they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know
nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no more able to
construe a line of them than to decipher an Egyptian obelisk.

This Essay, silly as it is, was exceedingly well received,
both in England and on the Continent. And the reason is
evident. The classical scholars who saw its absurdity were
generally on the side of the ancients, and were inclined rather to
veil than to expose the blunders of an ally; the champions of the
moderns were generally as ignorant as Temple himself; and the
multitude was charmed by his flowing and melodius diction.
He was doomed, however, to smart, as he well deserved, for
his vanity and folly.

Christchurch at Oxford was then widely and justly celebrated as a place where the lighter parts of classical learning were cultivated with success. With the deeper mysteries of philology neither the instructors nor the pupils had the smallest acquaintance. They fancied themselves Scaligers, as Bentley scornfully said, if they could write a copy of Latin verses witho only two or three small faults. From this College proceeded a new edition of the Letters of Phalaris, which were rare, and had been in request since the appearance of Temple's Essay. The nominal editor was Charles Boyle, a young man of noble family and promising parts; but some older members of the society lent their assistance. While the work was in preparation, an idle quarrel, occasioned, it should seem, by the negligence and misrepresentations of a bookseller, arose between Boyle and the King's Librarian, Richard Bentley. Boyle, in the preface to his edition, inserted a bitter reflection on

P

Bentley. Bentley revenged himself by proving that the Epistles of Phalaris were forgeries, and in his remarks on this subject treated Temple, not indecently, but with no great reverence.

Temple who was quite unaccustomed to any but the most respectful usage, who, even while engaged in politics, had always shrunk from all rude collision and had generally succeeded in avoiding it, and whose sensitiveness had been increased by many years of seclusion and flattery, was moved to most violent resentment, complained, very unjustly, of Bentley's foul-mouthed raillery, and declared that he had commenced an answer, but had laid it aside, "having no mind to enter the lists with such a mean, dull, unmannerly pedant." Whatever may be thought of the temper which Sir William showed on this occasion, we cannot too highly applaud his discretion in not finishing and publishing his answer, which would certainly have been a most extraordinary performance.

He was not, however, without defenders. Like Hector, when struck down prostrate by Ajax, he was in an instant covered by a thick crowd of shields. Christchurch was up in arms; and though that College seems then to have been almost destitute of severe and accurate learning, no academical society could show a greater array of orators, wits, politicians, bustling adventurers who united the superficial accomplishments of the scholar with the manners and arts of the man of the world; and this formidable body resolved to try how far smart repartees. well-turned sentences, confidence, puffing and intrigue could, on the question whether a Greek book were or were not genuine, supply the place of a little knowledge of Greek.

Out came the Reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth written by Atterbury with the assistance of Smalridge and others. A most remarkable book it is, and often

1 Atterbury, an ardent and able Jacobite, and a member of the brilliant literary society of the time of Anne, was successively Dean of Carlisle, Dean of Christ Church at Oxford, and then Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. He everywhere moved in an atmosphere of contention and intrigue. Smalridge, who succeeded him both at Carlisle and at Christ Church, used to say, Atterbury goes before, and sets every. thing on fire. I come after him with a bucket of water."

2

reminds us of Goldsmith's observation, that the French would be the best cooks in the world if they had any butcher's meat ; for that they can make ten dishes out of a nettle-top. It really "deserves the praise, whatever that praise may be worth, of being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant. The learning of the confederacy is that of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and address of mosi able, artful, and experienced men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten times larger than it is. The dexterity with which the con federates avoid grappling with those parts of the subject with which they know themselves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonderful. Now and then, indeed, they commit disgraceful blunders, for which old Busby,' under whom they had studied, would have whipped them all round. But this circumstance only raises our opinion of the talents which made such a fight with such scanty means. Let readers who are not acquainted with the controversy imagine a Frenchman, who has acquired just English enough to read the Spectator with a dictionary, coming forward to defend the genuineness of Ireland's Vortigern against Malone; 2 and they will have some notion of the feat which Atterbury had the audacity to undertake, and which, for a time, it was really thought that he had performed.

The illusion was soon dispelled. Bentley's answer for ever settled the question, and established his claim to the first place

Dr. Busby was Head Master of Westminster School from 1640 to 1695. Sixteen bishops, who had been his scholars, were on the bench at one and the same time. He educated two generations of successful statesmen and indifferent verse-writers. Among the names chronicled in Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Duke, Halifax, Stepney, King, Edmund Smith, and Rowe had all been Westminster boys. The mediocrity of the list is, however, redeemed by Dryden and Prior.

2 William Ireland forged a number of Shakspearian documents; and then, emboldened by success, composed the tragedy of Vortigern, which he attributed to the great poet. Malone destroyed the credit of the play by a pamphlet ; and the piece was hissed off the stage on the first night of representation. This event occurred in 1796. Ireland afterwards owned, and gloried in, the imposture.

amongst classical scholars. Nor do those do him justice who represent the controversy as a battle between wit and learning. For though there is a lamentable deficiency of learning on the side of Boyle, there is no want of wit on the side of Bentley. Other qualities, too, as valuable as either wit or learning, appear conspicuously in Bentley's book, a rare sagacity, an unrivalled power of combination, a perfect mastery of all the weapons of logic. He was greatly indebted to the furious out-CALA cry which the misrepresentations, sarcasms, and intrigues of his opponents had raised against him, an outcry in which fashionable and political circles joined, and which was echoed by thousands who did not know whether Phalaris ruled in Sicily or Siam. His spirit, daring even to rashness, self-confident even to negligence, and proud, even to insolent ferocity, was awed for the first and for the last time, awed, not into meanness or cowardice, but into wariness and sobriety. For once he ran no risks; he left no crevice unguarded; he wantoned in no paradoxes; above all, he returned no railing for the railing of his enemies. In almost every thing that he has written we can discover proofs of genius and learning. But it is only here that his genius and learning appear to have been constantly under the guidance of good sense and good temper.1

· The wits, unfortunately for themselves, chose the wrong side in this famous quarrel. Swift took up the cudgels against Bentley with great vigour in his "Battle of the Books." Pope, by a series of attacks upon the great critic, proved how little Greek a man requires to know in order to translate Homer. But the most unlucky of all was Dr. Garth, who embodied his opinion of the controversy in the following lines :

"So diamonds take a lustre from their foil,

And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle."

A couplet which affords the most conspicuous example in literature of the dangers, to which even a clever man lays himself open, who writes about what he does not understand.

The reade

ADDISON'S POEM OF THE CAMPAIGN

(Essay on Addisor.)

TIDINGS arrived of the great battle fought at Blenheim on
the 13th of August, 1704. By the Whigs the news was hailed
with transports of joy and pride. No fault, no cause of
quarrel, could be remembered by them against the Commander
whose genius had, in one day, changed the face of Europe,
saved the Imperial throne, humbled the House of Bourbon,
and secured the Act of Settlement against foreign hostility.
The feeling of the Tories was very different. They could not
indeed, without imprudence, openly express regret at an event
so glorious to their country; but their congratulations were so
cold and sullen as to give deep disgust to the victorious general
and his friends.

1675-1712
by-172 Godolphin was not a reading man.

Whatever time he
could spare from business he was in the habit of spending at
Newmarket or at the card table. But he was not absolutely
indifferent to poetry; and he was too intelligent an observer
not to perceive that literature was a formidable engine of
political warfare, and that the great Whig leaders had strength-
ened their party, and raised their character, by extending a
liberal and judicious patronage to good writers.
He was
mortified, and not without reason, by the exceeding badness of
the poems which appeared in honour of the battle of Blenheim.
One of those poems has been rescued from oblivion by the ex-
quisite absurdity of three lines.

"Think of two thousand gentlemen at least,

And each man mounted on his capering beast;
Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals."

Where to procure better verses the Treasurer did not know. He understood how to negotiate a loan, or remit a subsidy : he was also well versed in the history of running horses and fighting cocks but his acquaintance among the poets was very