Misc Writings and Speeches, vol 3 | Page 5

letters, Richard Bentley. The manuscript was in Bentley's
keeping. Boyle wished it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller

informed him that Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false, and
also that Bentley had spoken contemptuously of the letters attributed to
Phalaris, and of the critics who were taken in by such counterfeits,
which was perfectly true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a
bitterly ironical compliment to Bentley's courtesy. Bentley revenged
himself by a short dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles
were spurious, and the new edition of them worthless: but he treated
Boyle personally with civility as a young gentleman of great hopes,
whose love of learning was highly commendable, and who deserved to
have had better instructors.
Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm
which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with
forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with contempt; and the
Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their
college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their
influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the
Inns of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in
Parliament and in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their
unanimous cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated,
that the insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was
unequal to the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to
his tutor, Atterbury.
The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was,
in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the
controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the
curious, and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But it had
its day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in the studies of
men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant drawing-rooms of
Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and coquettes of that
age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the
Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in which the gay
young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who
wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean cups,
had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause of the
multitude undeserved. The book is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece,
and gives a higher notion of his powers than any of those works to

which he put his name. That he was altogether in the wrong on the
main question, and on all the collateral questions springing out of it,
that his knowledge of the language, the literature, and the history of
Greece was not equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year
to Cambridge and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to
deserve a flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that his
performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and valuable to a
judicious reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding badness. It is the
most extraordinary instance that exists of the art of making much show
with little substance. There is no difficulty, says the steward of
Moliere's miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the really
great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all. That
Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and
geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the origin
of the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during
some years, have been thought to have treated these subjects much
better than Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of
Christchurch had all the help which the most celebrated members of
that society could give him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit;
Friend and others some very bad archaeology and philology. But the
greater part of the volume was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his
own was revised and retouched by him: and the whole bears the mark
of his mind, a mind inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of
controversy, and familiar with all the artifices which make falsehood
look like truth, and ignorance like knowledge. He had little gold; but he
beat that little out to the very thinnest leaf, and spread it over so vast a
surface that to those who judged by a glance, and who did not resort to
balances and tests, the glittering heap of worthless matter which he
produced seemed to be an inestimable treasure of massy bullion. Such
arguments as he had he placed in the clearest light.