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