Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/312

238 whether a lion or a dolphin, always painted a rose. But Mr B. will prove that and  had a looser sense than what the grammarians put upon them; because Dion Chrysostome calls heroic verses on Sardanapalus's tomb. But there's a figure of rhetoric here, called self-contradiction, that's very frequent in our Examiner's reasonings. For he had newly said, a sophist could not mistake, the distinct sense of which was so well settled before his time by the grammarians: and now he produces Dion Chrysostome, (who, as he tells us, was as errant a Sophist and declaimer as ever was) employing it in a looser meaning than what the grammarians put upon it. But to let this pass; what he teaches us here about the distinct sense that the grammarians settled upon't, is but a cast of his own loose and unsettled sense. For the grammarians knew well enough, that was taken for epitaph, even without a pentameter in't. They could learn that out of Herodotus, among others, when he tells 'em, that the people of Ios, wrote this elegy on Homer's tomb—