CHAPTER V.

BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION.

We have seen that Bentley's essay in Wotton's book had been a hasty production. "I drew up that dissertation," he says, "in the spare hours of a few weeks; and while the Printer was employed about one leaf, the other was amaking." He now set to work to revise and enlarge it. He began his task about March, 1698-soon after Boyle's pamphlet appeared-but was interrupted in it by the two months of his residence at Worcester, from the end of May to the end of July. It was finished toward the close of 1698. The time employed upon it had thus been about seven and a half months, not free from other and urgent duties. It was published early in 1699. Let us clearly apprehend the point at issue. Boyle did not assert that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine; but he denied that Bentley had yet proved them to be spurious.

After a detailed refutation of the personal charges against him, Bentley comes to the Letters of Phalaris. First he takes the flagrant anachronisms. The Letters mention towns which, at the supposed date, were not built, or bore other names. Phalaris presents his physician with the ware of a potter named Thericles-much as if Oliver Cromwell were found dispensing the masterpieces

of Wedgwood. Phalaris quotes books which had not been written; nay, he is familiar with forms of literature which had not been created. Though a Dorian, he writes to his familiar friends in Attic, and in a species of false Attic which did not exist for five centuries after he was dead. Farmer of the taxes though he had been, he has no idea of values in the ordinary currency of his own country. Thus he complains that the hostile community of Catana had made a successful raid on his principality, and had robbed him of no less a sum than seven talents. Again, he mentions with some complacency that he has bestowed the munificent dower of five talents on a lady of distinction. According to the Sicilian standard, the loss of the prince would have amounted to twelve shillings and seven pence, while the noble bride would have received nine shillings. The occasions of the letters, too, are often singular. A Syracusan sends his brother to Akragas, a distance of a hundred miles, with a request that Phalaris would send a messenger to Stesichorus (another hundred miles or so), and beg that poet to write a copy of verses on the Syracusan's deceased wife. "This," says Bentley, "is a scene of putid and senseless formality." Then Phalaris (who brags in one of the letters that Pythagoras had stayed five months with him) says to Stesichorus, “pray do not mention me in your poems." "This," says Bentley, "was a sly fetch of our sophist, to prevent so shrewd an objection from Stesichorus's silence as to any friendship at all with him." But supposing Phalaris had really been so modest-Bentley adds-still, Stesichorus was a man of the world. The poet would have known “that those sort of requests are but a modest simulation, and a disobedience would have been easily pardoned." Again, these Letters are not mentioned by any writer before the

fifth century of our era, and it is clear that the ancients did not know them. Thus, in the Letters, Phalaris displays the greatest solicitude for the education of his son Paurolas, and writes to the young man in terms which would do credit to the best of fathers. But in Aristotle's time there was a tradition which placed the parental conduct of Phalaris in another light. It alleged, in fact, that, while this boy was still of a tender age, the prince had caused him to be served up at table: but how, asks Bentley-supposing the Letters to be genuine-" could he eat his son while he was an infant?" It is true, the works of some writers in the early Christian centuries (Phædrus, Paterculus, Lactantius) are not mentioned till long after their death. But the interval was one during which the Western world was lapsing into barbarism. The supposed epoch of Phalaris was followed by "the greatest and longest reign of learning that the world has yet seen:" and yet his Letters remain hidden for a thousand years. “Take them in the whole bulk, they are a fardle of commonplaces, without any life or spirit from action and circumstance. Do but cast your eye upon Cicero's letters, or any statesman's, as Phalaris was; what lively characters. of men there! what descriptions of place! what notifications of time! what particularity of circumstances! what multiplicity of designs and events! When you return to these again, you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an active, ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, commanding a million of subjects."

Bentley's incidental discussions of several topics are so many concise monographs, each complete in itself, each exhaustive within its own limits, and each, at the same

ness.

time, filling its due place in the economy of the whole. Such are the essays on the age of Pythagoras, on the beginnings of Greek Tragedy, on anapæstic verse, on the coinage of Sicily. In the last-named subject, it might have appeared almost impossible that a writer of Bentley's time should have made any near approximation to correctHe had not such material aids as are afforded by the Sicilian coins which we now possess-without which the statements of ancient writers would appear involved in hopeless contradiction. I am glad, therefore, to quote an estimate of Bentley's work in this department by a master of numismatic science. Mr. Barclay Head writes: "Speaking generally, Bentley's results are surprisingly accurate. I think I may safely say that putting aside what was to have been done within the last fifty years, Bentley's essay stands alone. Even Eckhel, in his 'Doctrina numorum' (1790), has nothing to compare with it." Again, Bentley's range and grasp of knowledge are strikingly seen in critical remarks of general bearing which are drawn from him by the course of the discussion. Thus at the outset he gives in a few words a broad view of the origin and growth of literary forgery in the ancient world. In the last two centuries before Christ, when there was a keen rivalry between the libraries of Pergamus and Alexandria, the copiers of manuscripts began the practice of inscribing them with the names of great writers, in order that they might fetch higher prices. Thus far, the motive of falsification was simply mercenary. But presently a different cause began to swell the number of spurious works. It was a favourite exercise of rhetoric, in the early period of the Empire, to compose speeches or letters in the name and character of some famous person. At first such exercises would, of course, make no pretence of being anything

more. But, as the art was developed, "some of the Greek Sophists had the success and satisfaction to see their essays in that kind pass with some readers for the genuine works of those they endeavoured to express. This, no doubt, was great content and joy to them; being as full a testimony of their skill in imitation, as the birds gave to the painter when they pecked at his grapes." Some of them, indeed, candidly confessed the trick. "But most of them took the other way, and, concealing their own names, put off their copies for originals; preferring that silent pride and fraudulent pleasure, though it was to die with them, before an honest commendation from posterity for being good imitators." And hence such Letters as those of Phalaris.

Dr. Aldrich had lately dedicated his Logic to Charles Boyle. Bentley makes a characteristic use of this circumstance. "If his new System of Logic teaches him such arguments," says Bentley, "I'll be content with the old ones.' The whole Dissertation, in fact, is a remorseless syllogism. But Bentley is more than a sound reasoner. He shows in a high degree the faculties which go to make debating power. He is frequently successful in the useful art of turning the tables. Alluding to his opponent's mock proof that "Dr. Bentley could not be the author of the Dissertation," he remarks that Boyle's Examination is open to a like doubt in good earnest, if we are to argue "from the variety of styles in it, from its contradictions to his edition of Phalaris, from its contradictions to itself, from its contradictions to Mr. B.'s character and to his title of honourable." Boyle had said of Bentley, "the man that writ this must have been fast asleep, for else he could never have talked so wildly." Bentley replies, "I hear a greater paradox talked of