Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/220

146 endeavour to prevail with Stesichorus to write an elegy upon her. Phalaris tries and prevails; but is not so successful in a second attempt of the same nature, that he makes at the instance of another Sicilian gentleman. I protest I can see no harm in all this: there may indeed, for aught I know, be 'putid formality' in it, because I can't well tell what those hard words mean; but I see nothing unnatural there, or misbecoming the character of Phalaris. "No!" says the Doctor, "What? can anyone believe that such stuff as this busied the head of the tyrant?" As low thoughts as the Doctor has of the Epistles, I find he has very high ones of Phalaris; he seems to have represented him to himself as some mighty monarch that had vast dominions, and was too great, and too busy, to attend such trifles: whereas he was only a petty prince of one town in Sicily, and as such, I hope, the office here given him was no ways below him. Indeed the Doctor has, for the honour of Phalaris, represented that town as exceeding populous; for Diodorus, he says, counts 200,000 souls in Agrigent, and others 800,000. Diodorus, I grant, in the place cited, says there were such numbers in it when the Carthaginians took it, Olymp.