emselves by uncompromising and intolerant orthodoxy.

A rapid survey of the history of general literary criticism at that
epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade of the
seventeenth century there had taken place the famous controversy
over the Letters of Phalaris, in which, against Charles Boyle and his
supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley at Cambridge, who
insisted that the letters were spurious. In the series of battles royal
which followed, although Boyle, aided by Atterbury, afterward so noted
for his mingled ecclesiastical and political intrigues, had gained a
temporary triumph by wit and humour, Bentley's final attack had proved
irresistible. Drawing from the stores of his wonderfully wide and minute
knowledge, he showed that the letters could not have been written in the
time of Phalaris--proving this by an exhibition of their style, which
could not then have been in use, of their reference to events which had
not then taken place, and of a mass of considerations which no one but
a scholar almost miraculously gifted could have marshalled so fully. The
controversy had attracted attention not only in England but throughout
Europe. With Bentley's reply it had ended. In spite of public applause
at Atterbury's wit, scholars throughout the world acknowledged Bentley's
victory: he was recognised as the foremost classical scholar of his
time; the mastership of Trinity, which he accepted, and the Bristol
bishopric, which he rejected, were his formal reward.

Although, in his new position as head of the greatest college in
England, he went to extreme lengths on the orthodox side in biblical
theology, consenting even to support the doctrine that the Hebrew
punctuation was divinely inspired, this was as nothing compared with the
influence of the system of criticism which he introduced into English
studies of classical literature in preparing the way for the application
of a similar system to ALL literature, whether called sacred or profane.

Up to that period there had really been no adequate criticism of ancient
literature. Whatever name had been attached to any ancient writing was
usually accepted as the name of the author: what texts should be imputed
to an author was settled generally on authority. But with Bentley began
a new epoch. His acute intellect and exquisite touch revealed clearly
to English scholars the new science of criticism, and familiarized the
minds of thinking men with the i