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
