generosity in allowing himself to be used as a stalking-horse for his tutors.[1] The book although full of every sort of blunder was also full of life, and had a kind of wit. Its success was immediate: every one, except a few obscure scholars, thought that Bentley was defeated, and as Budgell says, 'the world was pleased to see a young man of quality and fortune get the better of an old critic,'[2]—a sentence which exhibits the tone of the controversy. Bentley, it may be remarked, was thirty-six years of age.
Temple, who had suffered so severely at the hands of Wotton and Bentley, was delighted with Boyle's reply.[3] He had himself begun a reply to Wotton but abandoned it, evidently feeling that he was unequal to the task: and Swift took up the quarrel for him. But of this more will be said in its place.
Boyle's Examination advanced the quarrel about the
- ↑ In 1701 we hear that Bentley and Boyle have become friends and entertain a better opinion of one another than they did before. It was in this year that Atterbury issued the Short Review, (see p. xxxiv.).
- ↑ Budgell's Memoirs . . . of the late Earl of Orrery . . . (1732), p. 193.
- ↑ See Courtenay II. 186.
