Kitabı oku: «The Age of Dryden», sayfa 9

‘Lady Froth. Then you think that episode between Susan, the dairy-maid, and our coachman, is not amiss; you know I may suppose the dairy in town as well as in the country.

Brisk. Incomparable, let me perish! – But then being an heroic poem, had not you better call him a charioteer? charioteer sounds great; besides, your ladyship’s coachman having a red face, and you comparing him to the sun; and you know the sun is called heaven’s charioteer.

Lady Froth. Oh, infinitely better! I am extremely beholden to you for the hint; stay, we’ll read over those half a score lines again. [Pulls out a paper.] Let me see here, you know what goes before, – the comparison, you know.

[Reads.

 
For as the sun shines every day,
So, of our coachman I may say —
 

Brisk. I’m afraid that simile won’t do in wet weather; – because you say the sun shines every day.

Lady Froth. No, for the sun it won’t, but it will do for the coachman; for you know there’s more occasion for a coach in wet weather.

Brisk. Right, right, that saves all.

Lady Froth. Then, I don’t say the sun shines all the day, but that he peeps now and then; yet he does shine all the day too, you know, though we don’t see him.

Brisk. Right, but the vulgar will never comprehend that.

Lady Froth. Well, you shall hear. – Let me see.

[Reads.

 
For as the sun shines every day,
So, of our coachman I may say,
He shows his drunken fiery face,
Just as the sun does, more or less.
 

Brisk. That’s right, all’s well, all’s well! – More or less.

Lady Froth. [Reads.]

 
And when at night his labour’s done,
Then too, like heaven’s charioteer the sun —
 

Ay, charioteer does better.

 
Into the dairy he descends,
And there his whipping and his driving ends;
There’s he’s secure from danger of a bilk,
His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk.
 

For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so —

Brisk. Incomparably well and proper, egad! – But I have one exception to make: – don’t you think bilk (I know it’s good rhyme), but don’t you think bilk and fare too like a hackney-coachman?

Lady Froth. I swear and vow, I am afraid so. – And yet our Jehu was a hackney-coachman when my lord took him.

Brisk. Was he? I’m answered, if Jehu was a hackney-coachman. – You may put that in the marginal notes though, to prevent criticism. – Only mark it with a small asterism, and say, Jehu was formerly a hackney-coachman.

Lady Froth. I will; you’d oblige me extremely to write notes to the whole poem.

Brisk. With all my heart and soul, and proud of the vast honour, let me perish!’

Congreve excels not only in dialogue, but in painting a character by a single speech. How thoroughly we realize the inward and outward man of old Foresight the omen-monger, from a single passage in Love for Love:

‘Nurse. Pray heaven send your worship good luck! marry and amen with all my heart; for you have put on one stocking with the wrong side outward.

Fore. Ha! hm? faith and troth I’m glad of it. And so I have; that may be good luck in troth, in troth it may, very good luck: nay I have had some omens: I got out of bed backwards too this morning, without premeditation; pretty good that too; but then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens these, some bad, some good, our lives are chequered; mirth and sorrow, want and plenty, night and day, make up our time. But in troth I am pleased at my stocking; very well pleased at my stocking.’

Or Mr. Bluffe, the miles gloriosus of The Old Bachelor:

‘You must know, sir, I was resident in Flanders the last campaign, had a small part there, but no matter for that. Perhaps, sir, there was scarce anything of moment done but an humble servant of yours that shall be nameless, was an eye-witness of – I won’t say had the greatest share in it; though I might say that too, since I name nobody, you know. Well, Mr. Sharper, would you think it? in all this time this rascally gazette writer never so much as once mentioned me – not once, by the wars! – took no more notice than as if Nol. Bluffe had not been in the land of the living!

Sharper. Strange!

Bluffe. Ay, ay, no matter. – You see, Mr. Sharper, that after all I am content to retire – live a private person – Scipio and others have done it.’

Vanbrugh has less individuality than his eminent contemporaries, and has consequently produced less impression than they upon the public mind, has added fewer typical characters to comedy, and stands some steps nigher to oblivion. Yet he is their equal in vis comica, and their superior in stage workmanship. ‘He is no writer at all,’ says Hazlitt, ‘as to mere authorship; but he makes up for it by a prodigious fund of comic invention and ludicrous description, bordering upon caricature. He has none of Congreve’s graceful refinement, and as little of Wycherley’s serious manner and studious insight into the springs of character; but his exhibition of it in dramatic contrast and unlooked-for situations, where the different parties play upon one another’s failings, and into one another’s hands, keeping up the jest like a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and urging it to the utmost verge of breathless extravagance, in the mere eagerness of the fray, is beyond that of any other of our writers.’ In Hazlitt’s opinion, Vanbrugh did not bestow much pains upon the construction of his pieces, and their excellent dramatic effect is mainly to be attributed to his promptness in seizing upon the hints for powerful situations which continually arose as he went along. He has nothing of the passion which sometimes raises Congreve so near to the confines of tragedy, nor has he the airy gaiety of Farquhar; but his animal spirits are abundant and unforced, and his humour has a true Flemish exuberance. His characters are always lively and well discriminated, but the only type he can be said to have created is the model fop, Lord Foppington in The Relapse, and even he is partly borrowed from Etheredge’s Sir Fopling Flutter. He is nevertheless a most perfect portrait, and gives real literary distinction to what would otherwise have been a mere comedy of intrigue. The powerful though disagreeable character of Sir John Brute lends force to The Provoked Wife; and the unfinished Journey to London is grounded on an idea which might have been very fruitful, the country senator who has gone into Parliament as a speculation, but who, upon taking up his residence in London, finds that he loses more by the extravagance of his wife than he can gain by the prostitution of his vote. Vanbrugh’s other plays are mere comedies of intrigue, written without moral or immoral purpose for the sake of amusement, of which they are abundantly prolific for readers not repelled by a disregard of virtue so open and unblushing that, being too gay for cynicism, it almost seems innocence. The scene between Flippanta and her pupil in The Confederacy is an excellent specimen of Vanbrugh’s spirited comedy. It might be headed, Malitia supplet aetatem.

‘Flip. Nay, if you can bear it so, you are not to be pitied so much as I thought.

Cor. Not pitied! Why, is it not a miserable thing for such a young creature as I am should be kept in perpetual solitude, with no other company but a parcel of old fumbling masters, to teach me geography, arithmetic, philosophy, and a thousand useless things? Fine entertainment, indeed, for a young maid at sixteen! Methinks one’s time might be better employed.

Flip. Those things will improve your wit.

Cor. Fiddle, faddle! han’t I wit enough already? My mother-in-law has learned none of this trumpery, and is not she as happy as the day is long?

Flip. Then you envy her I find?

Cor. And well I may. Does she not do what she has a mind to, in spite of her husband’s teeth?

Flip. [Aside.] Look you there now! If she has not already conceived that as the supreme blessing of life!

Cor. I’ll tell you what, Flippanta; if my mother-in-law would but stand by me a little, and encourage me, and let me keep her company, I’d rebel against my father to-morrow, and throw all my books in the fire. Why, he can’t touch a groat of my portion; do you know that, Flippanta!

Flip. [Aside.] So – I shall spoil her! Pray Heaven the girl don’t debauch me!

Cor. Look you: in short, he may think what he pleases, he may think himself wise; but thoughts are free, and I may think in my turn. I’m but a girl, ’tis true, and a fool too, if you’ll believe him; but let him know, a foolish girl may make a wise man’s heart ache; so he had as good be quiet. – Now it’s out.

Flip. Very well, I love to see a young woman have spirit, it’s a sign she’ll come to something.

Cor. Ah, Flippanta! if you would but encourage me, you’d find me quite another thing. I’m a devilish girl in the bottom; I wish you’d but let me make one amongst you.

Flip. That never can be till you are married. Come, examine your strength a little. Do you think you durst venture upon a husband?

Cor. A husband! Why, a – if you would but encourage me. Come, Flippanta, be a true friend now. I’ll give you advice when I have got a little more experience. Do you in your conscience and soul think I am old enough to be married?

Flip. Old enough! why, you are sixteen, are you not?

Cor. Sixteen! I am sixteen, two months, and odd days, woman. I keep an exact account.

Flip. The deuce you are!

Cor. Why, do you then truly and sincerely think I am old enough?

Flip. I do, upon my faith, child.

Cor. Why, then, to deal as fairly with you, Flippanta, as you do with me, I have thought so any time these three years.

Flip. Now I find you have more wit than ever I thought you had; and to show you what an opinion I have of your discretion, I’ll show you a thing I thought to have thrown in the fire.

Cor. What is it, for Jupiter’s sake?

Flip. Something will make your heart chuck within you.

Cor. My dear Flippanta!

Flip. What do you think it is?

Cor. I don’t know, nor I don’t care, but I’m mad to have it.

Flip. It’s a four-cornered thing.

Cor. What, like a cardinal’s cap?

Flip. No, ’tis worth a whole conclave of ’em. How do you like it?

[Showing the letter.

Cor. O Lard, a letter! Is there ever a token in it?

Flip. Yes, and a precious one too. There’s a handsome young gentleman’s heart.

Cor. A handsome young gentleman’s heart! [Aside.] Nay, then, it’s time to look grave.

Flip. There.

Cor. I shan’t touch it.

Flip. What’s the matter now?

Cor. I shan’t receive it.

Flip. Sure you jest.

Cor. You’ll find I don’t. I understand myself better than to take letters when I don’t know who they are from.

Flip. I’m afraid I commended your wit too soon.

Cor. ’Tis all one, I shan’t touch it, unless I know who it comes from.

Flip. Heyday, open it and you’ll see.

Cor. Indeed I shall not.

Flip. Well – then I must return it where I had it.

Cor. That won’t serve your turn, madam. My father must have an account of this.

Flip. Sure you are not in earnest?

Cor. You’ll find I am.

Flip. So, here’s fine work! This ’tis to deal with girls before they come to know the distinction of sexes!

Cor. Confess who you had it from, and perhaps, for this once, I mayn’t tell my father.

Flip. Why then, since it must out, ’twas the Colonel. But why are you so scrupulous, madam?

Cor. Because if it had come from anybody else – I would not have given a farthing for it.

[Snatching it eagerly out of her hand.’

Farquhar has what Vanbrugh wants – individuality. He seems to identify himself with his favourite characters, the heedless, dissolute, but gentlemanly and good-hearted sparks about town whom he so delights to portray, and hence wins a firmer place in our affections than his wittier and in every way stronger rival, who might have been a comic automaton for any idea of his personality that we are able to form. Whether the inevitable conception of Farquhar is really correct may be doubted; it is not in harmony with the few particulars which we possess of his manners and personal appearance. While reading him, nevertheless, one feels no doubt of the applicability to the author of the character of his Sir Harry Wildair, ‘entertaining to others, and easy to himself, turning all passion into gaiety of humour.’ The plays answer the description of the personage; they are lively, rattling, entertaining, and the humour is certainly much in excess of the passion. Serjeant Kite, in The Recruiting Officer, has become proverbial, otherwise no character has been recognized as an absolute creation, though almost all are natural and unaffected. The Beaux’ Stratagem, his last play, is by common consent his best; it is assuredly admirable, from the truth and variety of the characters, and the pervading atmosphere of adventurous gaiety. The separation between Mr. and Mrs. Sullen is a good specimen of Farquhar’s vis comica:

‘Mrs. Sul. Hold, gentlemen, all things here must move by consent, compulsion would spoil us; let my dear and I talk the matter over, and you shall judge it between us.

Squire Sul. Let me know first who are to be our judges. Pray, sir, who are you?

Sir Chas. I am Sir Charles Freeman, come to take away your wife.

Squire Sul. And you, good sir?

Aim. Charles Viscount Aimwell, come to take away your sister.

Squire Sul. And you, pray, sir?

Arch. Francis Archer, esquire, come —

Squire Sul. To take away my mother, I hope. Gentlemen, you’re heartily welcome. I never met with three more obliging people since I was born! – And now, my dear, if you please, you shall have the first word.

Arch. And the last, for five pound!

Mrs. Sul. Spouse!

Squire Sul. Rib!

Mrs. Sul. How long have we been married?

Squire Sul. By the almanac, fourteen months; but by my account, fourteen years.

Mrs. Sul. ’Tis thereabout by my reckoning.

Count Bel. Garzoon, their account will agree.

Mrs. Sul. Pray, spouse, what did you marry for?

Squire Sul. To get an heir to my estate.

Sir Chas. And have you succeeded?

Squire Sul. No.

Arch. The condition fails of his side. – Pray, madam, what did you marry for?

Mrs. Sul. To support the weakness of my sex by the strength of his, and to enjoy the pleasures of an agreeable society.

Sir Chas. Are your expectations answered?

Mrs. Sul. No.

Count Bel. A clear case! a clear case!

Sir Chas. What are the bars to your mutual contentment?

Mrs. Sul. In the first place, I can’t drink ale with him.

Squire Sul. Nor can I drink tea with her.

Mrs. Sul. I can’t hunt with you.

Squire Sul. Nor can I dance with you.

Mrs. Sul. I hate cocking and racing.

Squire Sul. And I abhor ombre and piquet.

Mrs. Sul. Your silence is intolerable.

Squire Sul. Your prating is worse.

Mrs. Sul. Have we not been a perpetual offence to each other? a gnawing vulture at the heart?

Squire Sul. A frightful goblin to the sight?

Mrs. Sul. A porcupine to the feeling?

Squire Sul. Perpetual wormwood to the taste?

Mrs. Sul. Is there on earth a thing we could agree in?

Squire Sul. Yes – to part.

Mrs. Sul. With all my heart.

Squire Sul. Your hand.

Mrs. Sul. Here.

Squire Sul. These hands joined us, these shall part us. – Away!

Mrs. Sul. North.

Squire Sul. South.

Mrs. Sul. East.

Squire Sul. West – far as the poles asunder.

Count Bel. Begar, the ceremony be vera pretty!’

Farquhar is fuller of allusions to contemporary events and humours than any of the other dramatists, and these are sometimes very happy; as when a promising scheme is said to be in danger of ‘going souse into the water, like the Eddystone lighthouse,’ or when an alarm is given by shouting, ‘Thieves! thieves! murder! popery!’ Another peculiarity of all these dramatists, but especially Farquhar, is the constant use in serious passages of a broken blank verse, which continually seems upon the point of becoming regular ten-syllabled iambic, but never maintains this elevation for any considerable space. The extremely powerful scene between the two Fainalls, in Congreve’s Love for Love, for example, which borders closely upon tragedy, is all but regular blank verse, which, if perfectly finished, would be much better than the verse of The Mourning Bride. It is difficult to determine whether this was intentional or accidental. Possibly the exigencies of the performers had something to do with it. It is by no means unlikely that prose, as well as verse, was then declaimed with more attention to rhythm than is now the custom. In estimating the merits of these dramas it must never be forgotten, as a point in their favour, that they were written for the stage, and that success in the closet was quite a secondary consideration with the authors; on the other hand, that they had the advantage of being produced when the histrionic art of England was probably at its zenith.

This notice of the later Restoration comedy may be completed by the mention of three ladies who cultivated it with success during the latter part of the seventeenth century. How much of this success, in the case of one of them, was due to merit, and how much to indecency, is a difficult, though not in every sense of the term a nice or delicate question. Despite the offensiveness of her writings, Aphra Behn (1640-1689), whose maiden name was Johnson, is personally a sympathetic figure. She was born in 1640, and as a girl went out with her family to Surinam, then an English possession. She there made the acquaintance of the Indian chief Oroonoko and his bride Imoinda, afterwards celebrated in the novel by her upon which Southern founded his popular play. Returning to England, she married a Dutch merchant of the name of Behn, and after his death was sent as a spy to Antwerp. A young Dutchman to whom she was engaged died; she was wrecked and nearly drowned upon her return to England; and, probably from necessity, as the English government appears to have refused to recompense or even to reimburse her, turned novelist and playwright. Her novels will be noticed in another place; her eighteen plays have, with few exceptions, sufficient merit to entitle her to a respectable place among the dramatists of her age, and sufficient indelicacy to be unreadable in this. It may well be believed, on the authority of a female friend, that the authoress ‘had wit, humour, good-nature, and judgment; was mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation; was a woman of sense, and consequently a woman of pleasure.’ She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in Poets’ Corner. The plays of Mrs. Manley (1672-1724), though moderately successful, need not detain us here, but we shall have to speak of her as a writer of fiction. She was the daughter of a Cavalier knight, but became the mistress of Alderman Barber, and was concerned in several doubtful transactions. Swift, nevertheless, speaks of her as a good person ‘for one of her sort’ – fat and forty, it seems, but not fair. Mrs. Susannah Centlivre (1667-1723) appears to have had her share of adventures in her youth, but survived to contract one of the most respectable unions imaginable, namely, with the queen’s cook. She was a wholesale adapter from the French, and her lively comedies possess little literary merit, but so much dramatic instinct that three of them, The Busy Body, The Wonder, and A Bold Stroke for a Wife, remained long upon the list of acting plays, and might be represented even now.

CHAPTER VII.
CRITICISM

The age of the Restoration possessed many men qualified to shine in criticism, but their acumen is in general only indicated by casual remarks, and, setting aside the metrical prolusions of Roscommon and Sheffield, nearly all the serious criticism it has bequeathed to us proceeds from the pen of Dryden. No other of our poets except Coleridge and Wordsworth has given us anything so critically valuable, but Dryden’s principal service is one which they could not render; for, even if their style had equalled his – and this would be too much to say even of Wordsworth’s – it could not have exerted the same wide and salutary influence. Dryden is entitled to be considered as the great reformer of English prose, the writer in whom the sound principles of the Restoration were above all others impersonated, and who above all others led the way to that clear, sane, and balanced method of writing which it was the especial mission of Restoration literature to introduce. We need only compare his style with Milton’s to be sensible of the enormous progress in the direction of perspicuity and general utility. Milton is a far more eloquent writer, but his style is totally unfit for the close reasoning and accurate investigation which the pressure of politics and the development of science and philosophy were soon to require, and the rest of the prosaists of the time are, with few exceptions, either too pedantic or too commonplace. Dryden is lucid, easy, familiar, yet he can be august and splendid on occasion, and if he does not emulate Milton’s dithyrambic, the dignity of English prose loses nothing in his hands. Take the opening of his Dialogue on Dramatic Poesy:

‘It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late war, when our navy engaged the Dutch; a day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the globe, the commerce of nations, and the riches of the universe: while these vast floating bodies, on either side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our countrymen, under the happy conduct of his royal highness, went breaking, by little and little, into the line of the enemies; the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the event, which they knew was then deciding, every one went following the sound as his fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some took towards the park, some across the river, others down it; all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.

‘Amongst the rest, it was the fortune of Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander, to be in company together; three of them persons whom their wit and quality have made known to all the town; and whom I have chose to hide under these borrowed names, that they may not suffer by so ill a relation as I am going to make of their discourse.

‘Taking then a barge, which a servant of Lisideius had provided for them, they made haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind them that great fall of waters which hindered them from hearing what they desired: after which, having disengaged themselves from many vessels which rode at anchor in the Thames, and almost blocked up the passage towards Greenwich, they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently, and then, every one favouring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the noise of distant thunder, or of swallows in a chimney:⁸ those little undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror, which they had betwixt the fleets. After they had attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his head, and taking notice of it, was the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation’s victory: adding, that we had but this to desire in confirmation of it, that we might hear no more of that noise, which was now leaving the English coast.’

This fine induction can hardly have formed part of the original essay, which, Dryden tells us, was written in the country in 1665, since the naval battle, which was fought on June 3rd, 1665, is described as having taken place in ‘the first summer of the late war.’ One extraordinary passage must have been left uncorrected by oversight, at least we cannot well suppose that Dryden would have printed ‘Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem’ after the appearance of Paradise Lost, which was published on the day after the conclusion of the Peace of Breda, not then known in England. The essay has two objects not very compatible: to defend the English stage against the French, and to advocate the use of rhyme in tragedy, which necessarily gives the piece a French air, and makes it appear imitative, when it is in truth original. Dryden points out with considerable force the restrictions which French dramatists of the classical school impose upon themselves by servile adherence to the unities of time and place, and in a well-known passage which does honour to his taste sets Shakespeare above Ben Jonson. His criticism of Troilus and Cressida, in his essay on The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), is instructive as illustrating by force of contrast that enlarged view of Shakespeare for which we are indebted to Goethe and Coleridge. He justly censures Troilus and Cressida as a play; it does not occur to him that Shakespeare may have intended a satire. All his essays, which consist principally of prefaces and dedications to his own works, are worth reading; none more so than his defence of Virgil in the dedication to his translation of his poems, and the remarks on Horace and Juvenal in his Essay on Satire. Everywhere we must admire his sanity, penetration, and massive common sense; his chief defects are conventional prejudice, negligence (as when he ascribes the invention of blank verse to Shakespeare), and the parade of second-hand learning. It may be said of his criticisms, as truly as of his poems or plays, that his merits are his own, his faults those of his age.

Another critic of the stage only deserves notice in this capacity from his connection with Dryden. Thomas Rymer (1639-1714) will be mentioned again as a meritorious antiquary. As a critic he is remarkable for having by his Tragedies of the Last Age (1673) drawn some judicious remarks from Dryden, and for having analyzed Othello as a pattern of a bad play. He has consequently been unanimously hooted by his countrymen, for it passes belief that Pope should have praised him to Spence, though Spence affirms it. It was his misfortune to be an Englishman; in France at the time his views would have been thought very correct; in fact, he criticises Shakespeare much in the style of Voltaire. He is a votary of decorum and dignity, and would no more than Voltaire have let a mouse into a tragedy. He discusses with imperturbable gravity, ‘Who and who may kill one another with decency?’ and decides, ‘In poetry no woman is to kill a man, except her quality gives her the advantage above him. Poetical decency will not suffer death to be dealt to each other by such persons, whom the laws of duel allow not to enter the lists together.’ And Rymer would have been content to have dwelt in such decencies for ever.

Jeremy Collier, a Nonjuring clergyman (1650-1726), attained fame, not as the advocate of decencies, but of decency. His Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) occasioned a great sensation, and was efficacious in abating the evils against which it was directed, although it is probable that Addison’s mild rebuke and better example accomplished even more. As the adversary of men of wit and genius, Collier has become obnoxious to their representatives, and has been unfairly reviled as a sour fanatic. In fact he is very moderate, admits that the stage may be a valuable medium of instruction, and only denounces its abuse. Scott and Macaulay have done him justice, and Mr. Gosse gives an excellent analysis of his work in his biography of Congreve. His wit is as unquestionable as his zeal, but his argument is not everywhere equally cogent. On the chapter of profaneness he is fantastic and straitlaced, and so tender of dignities that he will not allow even the god Apis to be disrespectfully mentioned. On that of immorality he is unanswerable, and unless the incriminated dramatists were prepared to say, ‘Evil, be thou my good,’ they could but own

‘Pudet haec opprobria nobis

Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli.’

Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted to reply, but to little purpose. Dryden kissed the rod. Collier’s volume is said to have been ‘conceived, disposed, transcribed, and printed in a month.’ He had previously achieved notoriety as a Jacobite pamphleteer, and in his old age became the official head of the decaying sect of the Nonjurors.

Although Richard Bentley (1662-1743) belongs mainly to the eighteenth century, his dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699) falls within the seventeenth, and an account of the literary criticism of this age would be incomplete without some mention of the one epoch-making critical work it produced. There is no need to tell again the story of the Bentley-Boyle controversy, so admirably narrated by Macaulay and Jebb; but it may be observed here that it marks an era in criticism as the first example of the testimony of antiquity being irretrievably overthrown by internal evidence. It was not the first time that the genuineness of attested ancient writings had been disputed. Valla had waged war upon the forged donation of Constantine, but his case was so very clear that he had not been answered, but as far as possible ignored. Phalaris had found defenders, and this controversy was perhaps the first in which tradition and authority were fairly vanquished in a pitched battle. Bentley’s extraordinary powers of mind were almost equally evinced in his Boyle Lectures, also a production of the seventeenth century, which will be noticed in their place.