indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece, and gives a higher notion of his
powers than any of those works to which he put his name. That he
was altogether in the wrong on the main question, and on all the
collateral questions springing out of it, that his knowledge of
the language, the literature, and the history of Greece was not
equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge
and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve
a flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that
his performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and
valuable to a judicious reader. It is good by reason of its
exceeding badness. It is the most extraordinary instance that
exists of the art of making much show with little substance.
There is no difficulty, says the steward of Moliere's miser, in
giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the really great cook
is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all. That
Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and
geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the
origin of the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury
should, during some years, have been thought to have treated
these subjects much better than Bentley is strange indeed. It is
true that the champion of Christchurch had all the help which the
most celebrated members of that society could give him.
Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others some
very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the
volume was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his own was
revised and retouched by him: and the whole bears the mark of
his mind, a mind inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of
controversy, and familiar with all the artifices which make
falsehood look like truth, and ignorance like knowledge. He had
little gold; but he beat that little out to the very thinnest