Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/219

Rh strong reserve of four other suppositions; and if all these hold good, he will still prove the Epistles spurious. First he supposes that Erythia was poisoned by Python not long after Phalaris's banishment, because otherwise he supposes she could not want opportunities to follow him; then he supposes Erythia was poisoned in the island Astypalaea, where he supposes that her poisoner dwelt. Here's more postulatums than Euclid required to build the whole body of his elements upon, and yet he must be very kind to Dr Bentley that will grant him any one of them, since there is nothing, either in the Epistles themselves or in any other history I have had the luck to meet with, that can give 'em the least countenance. At present, therefore, I take the same liberty to deny every one of these suppositions as he has to assume them: if hereafter he can prove them in another language, 'twill then be time enough to show that they are nothing to the purpose.

In some other Epistles the Doctor has discovered a 'scene of putid and senseless formality.' A man of quality, in Syracuse, whose wife was lately dead, sends his brother to Phalaris with a request that he would