Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/189

Rh spirit from action and circumstance. Do but cast your eye upon Cicero's letters, or any statesman's, as Phalaris was: what lively characters of men there! what descriptions of place! what notifications of time! what particularity of circumstances! what multiplicity of designs and events! When you return to these again, you feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an active, ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, commanding a million of subjects. All that takes or affects you, is a stiffness, and stateliness, and operoseness, of style: but as that is improper and unbecoming in all epistles, so especially it is quite aliene from the character of Phalaris, a man of business and despatch.

[pp. 66–68]

I must now beg the favour of one word with our late Editors of this author [Phalaris]. They have told the world, in their Preface, that among other specimens of their diligence, they collated the King's MS. as far as the XLth Epistle, and would have done so throughout, but that the Library-keeper out of his