cealed motive lies deeper; and the party feelings of the haughty
Aristarchus of Cambridge, and a faction of wits at Oxford, under the
secret influence of Dean Aldrich, provoked this fierce and glorious
contest.

Wit, ridicule, and invective, by cabal and stratagem, obtained a
seeming triumph over a single individual, but who, like the Farnesian
Hercules, personified the force and resistance of incomparable
strength. "The Bees of Christchurch," as this conspiracy of wits has
been called, so musical and so angry, rushed in a dark swarm about
him, but only left their fine stings in the flesh they could not
wound. He only put out his hand in contempt, never in rage. The
Christchurch men, as if doubtful whether wit could prevail against
learning, had recourse to the maliciousness of personal satire. They
amused an idle public, who could even relish sense and Greek, seasoned
as they were with wit and satire, while Boyle was showing how Bentley
wanted wit, and Bentley was proving how Boyle wanted learning.

To detect the origin of the controversy, we must find the seed-plot
of Bentley's volume in Sir William Temple's "Essay upon Ancient and
Modern Learning," which he inscribed to his alma mater, the
University of Cambridge. Sir William, who had caught the contagion
of the prevalent literary controversy of the times, in which the
finest geniuses in Europe had entered the lists, imagined that the
ancients possessed a greater force of genius, with some peculiar
advantages--that the human mind was in a state of decay--and that
our knowledge was nothing more than scattered fragments saved out of
the general shipwreck. He writes with a premeditated design to dispute
the improvements or undervalue the inventions of his own age. Wotton,
the friend of Bentley, replied by his curious volume of "Reflections
on Ancient and Modern Learning." But Sir William, in his ardour, had
thrown out an unguarded opinion, which excited the hostile contempt of
Bentley. "The oldest books," he says, "we have, are still in their
kind the best; the two most ancient that I know of, in prose, are
'AEsop's Fables' and 'Phalaris's Epistles.'"--The "Epistles," he
insists, exhibit every excellence of "a statesman, a soldier, a wit,
and a scholar." That ancient author, who Bentley afterwards asserted
was only "some dreaming pedant, with his elbow on his desk."

Bentley, bristled over with Greek, perhaps then considered that to
notice a vernacular and volatile w