During the last decade of the
seventeenth century there had taken place the famous controversy
over the _Letters of Phalaris_, in which, against Charles Boyle and
his supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley at Cambridge,
who insisted that the letters were spurious. In the series of
battles royal which followed, although Boyle, aided by Atterbury,
afterward so noted for his mingled ecclesiastical and political
intrigues, had gained a temporary triumph by wit and humour,
Bentley's final attack had proved irresistible. Drawing from the
stores of his wonderfully wide and minute knowledge, he showed that
the letters could not have been written in the time of
Phalaris--proving this by an exhibition of their style, which could
not then have been in use, of their reference to events which had
not then taken place, and of a mass of considerations which no one
but a scholar almost miraculously gifted could have marshalled so
fully. The controversy had attracted attention not only in England
but throughout Europe.
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