Page:The common reader.djvu/278

 ceeded by a series of disputes which force upon us the extraordinary spectacle of men of learning and genius, of authority and divinity, brawling about Greek and Latin texts, and calling each other names for all the world like bookies on a racecourse or washerwomen in a back street. For this vehemence of temper and virulence of language were not confined to Bentley alone; they appear unhappily characteristic of the profession as a whole. Early in life, in the year 1691, a quarrel was fastened upon him by his brother chaplain Hody for writing Malelas, not as Hody preferred, Malela. A controversy in which Bentley displayed learning and wit, and Hody accumulated endless pages of bitter argument against the letter s ensued. Hody was worsted, and “there is too much reason to believe, that the offence given by this trivial cause was never afterwards healed”. Indeed, to mend a line was to break a friendship. James Gronovius of Leyden—“homunculus eruditione mediocri, ingenio nullo”, as Bentley called him-—attacked Bentley for ten years because Bentley had succeeded in correcting a fragment of Callimachus where he had failed.

But Gronovius was by no means the only scholar who resented the success of a rival with a rancour that grey hairs and forty years spent in editing the classics failed to subdue. In all the chief towns of Europe lived men like the notorious de Pauw of Utrecht, “a person who has justly been considered the pest and disgrace of letters”, who, when a new theory or new edition appeared, banded themselves together to deride and