Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/82

 62 the famous church of Lisseweghe, the tower of which rears itself aloft over the dunes of that coast. Meetkerke died in London in 1591. The question which Warner discussed in this tract was the subject of much controversy in the reign of the third George and this little treatise attracted the attention of that age's chief classical scholars. Payne Knight, one of the Holland House and Edinburgh Review set, wrote that he had perused it " with equal delight and satisfaction " and bore witness to the "learning and ingenuity employed upon so dry a subject and enlivened by so much wit and humour." Uvedale Price, a country gentleman and neighbour of Payne Knight, and like him a devotee of classical literature, in his " essay on the modern pronunciation of the Greek and Latin languages " praised it for " many just remarks and apt examples and illustrations which I have freely made use of" but censured the absence of plan and its style "as diffuse and full of singularities." George Dyer puts on record that Matthew Raine, one of the greatest heads of Charterhouse, " adopted much of this theory of Metronariston into the Charterhouse school" and Thomas Green, the author of an obsolete "diary of a lover of literature " which enjoyed abundant popularity in its day confessed (p. 209) that the arguments of Warner had convinced him, but that the book was " teasingly written." The reviewer in the British Critic for Sept. 1797, speaks of the style as defying " all description, rambling beyond example, continually aiming at wit or humour, with the unhappiest effect " and pronounces the dedication to Jacob Bryant " written, if possible still worse than the book." In our time, just two years ago, T. S. Omond, in a valuable work on " english metrists " (pp. 83-84) refers to his prede- cessor's volume as " ascribed to a Dr. John Warner, whom I cannot otherwise identify," who pokes fun all round, even at such venerable names as Bentley, Handel and Horsley. The