Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/242

168 first put to the press, Dr Bentley, at my desire, undertook to write a dissertation about Phalaris and Æsop, to be added to my book. But being called away into the country, he could not at that time be as good as his word. Afterwards, when the second edition of my book was in the press, I renewed my request to him, and challenged his promise. He desired me to excuse him; because now the case was altered, and he could not write that dissertation without giving a censure of the late edition at Oxford. But I did not think that a sufficient reason, why I should lose that treatise to the world, by receding from the right and power that he had given me to demand it.

The reader will please to observe, that Mr Wotton’s Discourse was first printed 1694, and Phalaris the year after. A plain argument that the Examiner is quite out in his reckoning; when he pretends, that I first engaged in that dissertation, purely to fall foul on his book. I was so far from harbouring such vengeance in my heart, that if the Editor, or anybody