Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/203

Rh Christian design of exposing me, and resolved, whatever time or pains it might cost him, to prove that the Epistles I had put out, were a ridiculous cheat; and that I (or whoever the Editor was) was to be pitied for giving myself so much trouble about them.

I see Monsieur Rochefoucauld drew his observation from Nature when he said, "We often pardon those that injure us, but we can never forgive those that we injure."

[pp. 91–112]

Hitherto Dr Bentley has kept himself pretty well within his province, and criticised chiefly upon words, and phrases, and dialects; in his next general proof he ventures to criticise upon things, and to show the Letters an imposture, from the matter and business of 'em. "They are a fardle of commonplaces," he says, "without any life or spirit from action and circumstance. When you come to 'em, you find, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with a dreaming pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an active, ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, &c. All that takes or affects