Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the
storm which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated
Boyle with forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with
contempt; and the Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as
much attached to their college as a Scotchman to his country, or
a Jesuit to his order. Their influence was great. They were
dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns of Court and in the
College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the
literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous cry
was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was
unequal to the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore,
assigned to his tutor, Atterbury.

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which
was, in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to
which the controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now
read only by the curious, and will in all probability never be
reprinted again. But it had its day of noisy popularity. It was
to be found, not only in the studies of men of letters, but on
the tables of the most brilliant drawing-rooms of Soho Square and
Covent Garden. Even the beaus and coquettes of that age, the
Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the
Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in which the gay
young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who
wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and
Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor
was the applause of the multitude undeserved. The book is,