istant
of Dean Aldrich, a divine now chiefly remembered by his catches,
but renowned among his contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a
high-churchman. It was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of
Aldrich to employ the most promising youths of his college in editing
Greek and Latin books. Among the studious and well-disposed lads who
were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of
philology when they should have been content to be learners, was Charles
Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great
experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to
prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence.
It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric
as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent
men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste
and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish
them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that they
can hardly impose on an intelligent schoolboy. The best specimen which
has come down to us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such an
imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully would himself have read with
wonder and delight. The worst specimen is perhaps a collection of
letters purporting to have been written by that Phalaris who governed
Agrigentum more than 500 years before the Christian era. The evidence,
both internal and external, against the genuineness of these letters is
overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in company
with much that was far more valuable, from their obscurity, they were
pronounced spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and
by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth,
it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of
Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a
man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and
artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a
crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before
there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language. But, though
Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of many good English
writers, and of a greater number of clever and fashionable men of the
world than belonged to any other academic body, there was not then in
the college a single man