Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/223

Rh It is objected that if these letters about the elegy were Phalaris's he would have expressed himself properly, and not have called the same copy of verses and ; which are as different from one another as Theognis is from Pindar: "an egregious piece of dulness says the Doctor, and which proves him to be a mere asinus ad lyram!" Now to see the different cast of men's heads: allowing the error in this case, so egregiously dull am I, that I should have reasoned just the other way from it—that if a sophist had writ these letters, he would never have confounded these two words, the distinct sense of which was so well settled before his time by the grammarians. But in Phalaris's time the meaning of these terms of art might not be so strictly marked out, or a Prince might not think himself obliged to take notice of it, and to write with all the exactness of a scholar. So that from this very mistake, if it were one, I should have inferred something in favour of the letters; but to our misfortune here is no mistake. Phalaris did but as a nicer man than he might have done: he calls the poem when he asks it of Stesichorus and did not know in what verse it would be composed by him, and