Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/217

Rh in some of the places that contended for his birth, where the apotheosis, or deification, of that poet is described; and a learned man, Cuperus, has writ a large comment upon it, which methinks the Doctor should have been acquainted with, though he be not a foreign professor.

Ere I quit this particular I must observe a little slip of the Doctor's in telling us that Himera, in Tully's time, was called Thermae. I believe it was not, because Tully himself assures us that Himera and Thermae were two different towns, and the latter built at some distance from the ruins of the former; and without this distinction between Himera and Thermae, 'tis impossible to understand Diodorus where he says that after Himera was sacked, and rased by the Carthaginians, it continued altogether uninhabited even to his days; which could not be true if Himera and Thermae were the same, for that Thermae was well inhabited in Diodorus's time, is past dispute. I will not deny but that some careless passages may perhaps have dropped from the pens of old authors, where these two are not nicely distinguished, but it is not in works where they set up for