"cohort," and paid the money into the treasury.

As to the sum thus saved, there has been a dispute which has given rise
to some most amusing literary vituperation. The care with which MSS.
have been read now enables us to suppose that it was ten hundred
thousand sesterces--thus expressed, "H.S.X."--amounting to something
over L8000. We hear elsewhere, as will be mentioned again, that Cicero
realized out of his own legitimate allowance in Cilicia a profit of
about L18,000; and we may imagine that the "cohort" should think itself
aggrieved in losing L8000 which they expected to have divided among
them. Middleton has made a mistake, having supposed the X to be
CI[C] or M--a thousand instead of ten--and quotes the sum
saved as having amounted to eight hundred thousand instead of eight
thousand pounds. We who have had so much done for us by intervening
research, and are but ill entitled to those excuses for error which may
fairly be put forward on Middleton's behalf, should be slow indeed in
blaming him for an occasional mistake, seeing how he has relieved our
labors by infinite toil on his part; but De Quincey, who has been very
rancorous against Cicero, has risen to a fury of wrath in his
denunciation of Cicero's great biographer. "Conyers Middleton," he says,
"is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust."
The cause of this was that Middleton, a beneficed clergyman of the
Church of England, and a Cambridge man, differed from other Cambridge
clergymen on controversial points and church questions. Bentley was his
great opponent--and as Bentley was a stout fighter, so was Middleton.
Middleton, on the whole, got the worst of it, because Bentley was the
stronger combatant; but he seems to have stood in good repute all his
life, and when advanced in years was appointed Professor of Natural
History. He is known to us, however, only as the biographer of Cicero.
Of this book, Monk, the biographer of Middleton's great opponent,
Bentley, declares that, "for elegance, purity, and ease, Middleton's
style yields to none in the English language." De Quincey says of it
that, by "weeding away from it whatever is colloquial, you would strip
it of all that is characteristic"--meaning, I suppose, that the work
altogether wants dignity of composition. This charge is, to my thinking,
so absolutely contrary to the fact, that it needs only to be named to be
confuted by the opinion of all who have read the work. De Quincey