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.

Bentley scornfully said, if they could | though that College seems then to have write a copy of Latin verses with only been almost destitute of severe and 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 this 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 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 reve

rence.

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 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 most 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 confederates 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 Christchurch was up in arms; and | Ireland's Vortigern against Malone;

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 succeed 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.

Οὔτις ἐδυνήσατο ποιμένα λαών Οὐτάσαι, οὐδὲ βαλεῖν πρὶν γὰρ περίβησαν ἄριστοι,

Πουλυδάμας τι, καὶ Αἰνείας, καὶ δῖος Αγήνως,
Σαρπηδών τ' ἀρχὲς Λυκίων, καὶ Γλαύκος

ἀμύμων.

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.

honoured his studies and his profession, and degraded himself almost to the level of De Pauw.

Temple did not live to witness the utter and irreparable defeat of his champions. He died, indeed, at a fortunate moment, just after the appearance of Boyle's book, and while all England was laughing at the way. in which the Christchurch men had handled the pedant. In Boyle's book, Temple was praised in the highest terms, and compared to Memmius: not a very happy comparison; for almost the only particular information which we have about Memmius is that, in agitated times, he thought it his duty to attend exclusively to politics, and that his friends could not venture, except when the Republic was quiet and prosperous, to intrude on him with their philosophical and poetical productions. It is on this account that Lucretius puts up the exquisitely beautiful prayer for peace with which his poem opens:

"Nam neque nos agere hoc patriaï tempore iniquo

Possumus æquo animo, nec Memmiî clara

propago

Talibus in rebus communi deesse saluti."

The illusion was soon dispelled. Bentley's answer for ever settled the question, and established his claim to the first place 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 outcry 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 in Siam. His spirit, daring even to rashness, self-confident even to negligence, and proud even to msolent 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. Here, we find none of that besotted reliance on his own powers and on his own luck, which he showed when he undertook to edite Milton; none of that perverted ingenuity which deforms so many of his notes on Horace; none of that disdainful carelessness by which he laid himself open to the keen and dexterous thrust of Middleton; none of that extravagant vaunting and savage scurrility by which he afterwards dis-great critic, long after he had shaken

This description is surely by no means applicable to a statesman who had, through the whole course of his life, carefully avoided exposing himself in seasons of trouble; who had re peatedly refused, in most critical con junctures, to be Secretary of State; and who now, in the midst of revolutions, plots, foreign and domestic wars, was quietly writing nonsense about the visits of Lycurgus to the Brahmins and the tunes which Arion played to the Dolphin.

We must not omit to mention that, while the controversy about Phalaris was raging, Swift, in order to show his zeal and attachment, wrote the Battle of the Books, the earliest piece in which his peculiar talents are discernible. We may observe that the bitter dislike of Bentley, bequeathed by Temple to Swift, seems to have been communicated by Swift to Pope, to Arbuthnot, and to others, who continued to tease the

All

hands very cordially both with Boyle | subtle speculations, sometimes prompted and with Atterbury. him to talk on serious subjects in a Sir William Temple died at Moor manner which gave great and just Park in January, 1699. He appears offence. It is not unlikely that Temple, to have suffered no intellectual decay. who seldom went below the surface of His heart was buried under a sun-dial any question, may have been infected which still stands in his favourite with the prevailing scepticism. garden. His body was laid in West- that we can say on the subject is, that minster Abbey by the side of his wife; there is no trace of impiety in his and a place hard by was set apart for works, and that the ease with which he Lady Giffard, who long survived him. carried his election for an university, Swift was his literary executor, super- where the majority of the voters were intended the publication of his Letters clergymen, though it proves nothing and Memoirs, and, in the performance as to his opinions, must, we think, be of this office, had some acrimonious considered as proving that he was not, contests with the family. as Burnet seems to insinuate, in the habit of talking atheism to all who came near him.

Of Temple's character little more remains to be said. Burnet accuses him of holding irreligious opinions, and corrupting every body who came near him. But the vague assertion of so rash and partial a writer as Burnet, about a man with whom, as far as we know, he never exchanged a word, is of little weight. It is, indeed, by no means improbable that Temple may have been a freethinker. The Osbornes thought him so when he was a very young man, large proportion of the gentlemen of rank and fashion who made their as a statesman can we allot to him any entrance into society while the Puritan very high place. As a man, he seems party was at the height of power, and to us to have been excessively selfish, while the memory of the reign of that but very sober, wary, and far-sighted party was still recent, conceived a in his selfishness; to have known better strong disgust for all religion. The than most people what he really wanted imputation was common between in life; and to have pursued what he Temple and all the most distinguished wanted with much more than ordinary courtiers of the age. Rochester and steadiness and sagacity, never suffering Buckingham were open scoffers, and himself to be drawn aside either by bad Mulgrave very little better. Shaftes- or by good feelings. It was his conbury, though more guarded, was sup-stitution to dread failure more than he posed to agree with them in opinion. desired success, to prefer security, All the three noblemen who were comfort, repose, leisure, to the turmoil Temple's colleagues during the short and anxiety which are inseparable from time of his sitting in the Cabinet were greatness; and this natural languor of of very indifferent repute as to ortho- mind, when contrasted with the maligdoxy. Halifax, indeed, was generally nant energy of the keen and restless considered as an atheist; but he spirits among whom his lot was cast, solemnly denied the charge; and, in- sometimes appears to resemble the modeed, the truth seems to be that he deration of virtue. But we must own was more religiously disposed than that he seems to us to sink into littlemost of the statesmen of that age, ness and meanness when we compare though two impulses which were un-him, we do not say with any high ideal usually strong in him, a passion for standard of morality, but with many of ludicrous images, and a passion for those frail men who, aiming at noble

Temple, however, will scarcely carry with him any great accession of authority to the side either of religion or of infidelity. He was no profound thinker. He was merely a man of lively parts and quick observation, a man of the world among men of letters, a man of letters among men of the world. Mere scholars were dazzled by the Ambassador and Cabinet counsellor; And it is certain that a mere politicians by the Essayist and Historian. But neither as a writer nor

ends, but often drawn from the right, between the effect of written words, path by strong passions and strong which are perused and reperused in the temptations, have left to posterity a stillness of the closet, and the effect of doubtful and checkered fame.

སྒྱུ་

t

His mind is of large grasp; nor is he deficient in dialectical skill. But he does not give his intellect fair play. There is no want of light, but a great want of what Bacon would have called dry light. Whatever Mr. Gladstone secs is refracted and distorted by a false medium of passions and prejudices. His style bears a remarkable analogy to his mode of thinking, and indeed exercises great influence on his mode of thinking. His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. Half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. He has one gift most dangerous to a speculator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import; of a kind of language which affects us much in the same way in which the lofty diction of the Chorus of Clouds affected the sim ple-hearted Athenian.

neration, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language. The habit of discussing questions in this way necessarily reacts on the intellects of our ablest men, particularly of those who are introduced into parliament at a very early age, before their minds have expanded to full maturity. The talent for debate is developed in such men to a degree which, to the multitude, seems as marvellous as the performance of an Italian Improvisatore. But they are fortunate indeed if they retain unimpaired the faculties which are required for close reasoning or for enlarged speculation. Indeed we should sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister ὦ γῆ τοῦ φθέγματος, ὡς ἱερὸν, καὶ σεμνὸν, in the Hebrides, than from a statesman who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons.

We therefore hail with pleasure, though assuredly not with unmixed pleasure, the appearance of this work. That a young politician should, in the intervals afforded by his parliamentary avocations, have constructed and propounded, with much study and mental toil, an original theory on a great problem in politics, is a circumstance which, abstracted from all consideration of the soundness or unsoundness of his opinions, must be considered as highly creditable to him. We certainly cannot wish that Mr. Gladstone's doctrines may become fashionable among public men. But we heartily wish that his laudable desire to penetrate beneath the surface of questions, and to arrive, by long and intent meditation, at the knowledge of great general laws, were much more fashionable than we at all expect it to become.

καὶ τερατώδες.

When propositions have been established, and nothing remains but to amplify and decorate them, this dim magnificence may be in place. But it it is admitted into a demonstration, it is very much worse than absolute nonsense; just as that transparent haze, through which the sailor sees capes and mountains of false sizes and in false bearings, is more dangercus than utter darkness. Now, Mr. Gladstone is fond of employing the phraseology of which we speak in those parts of his works which require the utmost perspicuity and precision of which human language is capable; and in this way he deludes first himself, and then his readers. The foundations of his theory which ought to be buttresses of adamant, are made out of the flimsy materials which are fit only for perorations. This fault is one which no subsequent care or industry can correct. The more strictly Mr. Gladstone reasons on his Mr. Gladstone seems to us to be, in premises, the more absurd are the conmany respects, exceedingly well quali-clusions which he brings out; and, fied for philosophical investigation. when at last his good sense and good

H H