Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/221

 LXXXXIII. 3, when as he tells us in the same place, it was in its most prosperous and flourishing estate: but must there needs be as many inhabitants in it 150 years before in the reign of Phalaris? As for his other witness, Laertius, his 800,000 are given up by the learned as a gross mistake, which Bochart supposes to have risen from the change of a numeral into a ; or however that may be, the account, he says, is 'incredible and utterly false.' Incredible as it is, the Doctor vouchsafes to take up with it, and it grows under his hands; for by that time we are got to the end of this article, these 800,000 are a million of subjects—the 200,000 are thrown in carelessly to make it a round number. Let it be a million: yet there have been tyrants, with many millions of subjects at their command, who have thought fit to employ and entertain themselves much after this manner. Has the Doctor, who deals so much in fragments, never seen those of Augustus's letters to Horace? Has he never heard that we owe the Fourth Book of Horace's Odes, and the finest of all his Epistles, to that Prince's importunity, who pressed, and obliged him to write, and to make mention of him in his poems? And such