on in England, but it had not attracted general attention Sir William Temple was one of the best-known men in England, and the public paid to his utterances that peculiar deference which is shown to a popular statesman when he leaves politics and turns to a subject of which he is profoundly ignorant. The greater part of his Essay is given in the Appendix to this volume (pp. 50-76), and the reader can judge its merits for himself. One paragraph in it involved Temple in a bitter dispute. There existed, among a large number of other such compositions, a series of 148 letters supposed to have been written by Phalaris, 'a shadowy figure in the early legends of ancient Sicily.' Of Phalaris the most important thing known is that he was wont to roast to death in a brazen bull those persons who incurred his displeasure. There is not the slightest doubt that the Epistles attributed to him were spurious compositions, written hundreds of years after his death : but when Temple wrote some eminent scholars regarded them as genuine.

Temple may have read the Epistles in one of the Latin translations enumerated in Boyle's Preface (see pp. 93 and 305-8), or in the English translation made by one

b

W.D. and published in 1634: that he could not have read them in the Greek in which they were written, seems quite certain. Nevertheless, in the paragraph of his Essay just referred to, writing as one who had moved as an equal among the greatest men of his time, and as one who had corresponded with kings, Temple asserted that the Epistles must be genuine, because no forger could possibly have imitated so perfectly the thoughts and language of a tyrant. By so choosing his ground Temple left himself no way of escape in case the Epistles should be proved spurious. Later he would have been happier if he had not written with such a show of conviction. For the time, however, all went well. His Essay was received with applause, and he had no suspicion that any hand would be raised against him.

Charles Boyle

Charles Boyle (grand-nephew of Robert Boyle, the great scientist), a boy of seventeen, was in 1693 at Christ Church, Oxford. He seems to have been clever, and was very much liked. Dr Aldrich, then Dean of Christ Church, was, we are told, in the habit of asking

his best pupils to edit some classical author.

In 1693,

no doubt owing to Temple's Essay, he asked Boyle to prepare an edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. It was not to be expected that a boy of Boyle's age should be able to prepare, unaided, an edition of a Greek author; and it must have been understood in academic circles that Aldrich's young men relied upon their tutors for the learning to be put into their books: but no doubt many men resented the fraud of issuing, in the name of a boy, the work of his masters. During 1693 and 1694 Boyle worked at his edition.

Wotton's 'Reflections' (1694)

Meanwhile an opponent to Sir William Temple's views was writing a book to demonstrate the folly of belittling the moderns in order to increase the reputation of the ancients. William Wotton had as a child exhibited the most wonderful precocity: at the age of six he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at ten he entered Cambridge; and at thirteen he obtained his degree. When Temple's Essay appeared he was about twenty-four years old. He proceeded to write

a book in which he compared the achievements of the ancients and moderns in Moral and Political Knowledge, in Eloquence and Poetry, in Grammar, in Architecture, Statuary, and Painting, in Logic and Metaphysics, in Geometry and Arithmetic, in Chemistry, in Anatomy, in Natural History, in Astronomy and Optics, in Music, in Physic, in Philology, and in Theology; and he wrote besides chapters on the learning of Pythagoras and the most ancient philosophers of Greece, on the History, Geometry, Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Alchemy of the Ancient Egyptians, and on the learning of the Ancient Chaldæans and Arabians.

The book appeared in 1694, when Wotton was twenty-eight years old, and was called Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. Although its style was not exhilarating, the book was quite readable, and it disposed decisively of the claims of the ancients in learning, though not of course in literature and the fine arts. Wotton's tone in speaking of Sir William Temple is extremely civil, though one detects here and there a suspicion of contempt, but he destroyed utterly the fabric of his vision. Temple had not thought that any

one would dare to answer him, still less that any one would refute him, and Wotton's book made him exceedingly angry. He was sufficiently mortified, Swift said later, at being called the adversary of Wotton.1 But worse things were to come.

Boyle's 'Phalaris' (1695)

In the course of his work upon Phalaris (which does not appear to have been very arduous) Boyle (or his tutors) wished to obtain the readings of a manuscript copy of the Epistles of Phalaris which was in the Royal Library at St. James's Palace. Accordingly in July or August 1693 he instructed his bookseller Thomas Bennet, who lived at the sign of the Half-Moon, in St. Paul's Churchyard, to obtain the manuscript for him. The Librarian (or Librarykeeper as he was called) at St. James's was at this moment Henri Justel,2 but Bennet does not seem to have made any application to him.3

1 See p. lii.

2 The date of Justel's death is uncertain; it is usually given as Sept. 1693:

3 See the letter printed at p. 294 of this vol.