The witty Dr. William King, student of Christ Church, Oxford, and afterwards Judge of the Irish Court of Admiralty, presented an example of the skilled controversialist spoken of by Hill Burton as letting fly "a few Parthian arrows from the Index." He was dubbed by Isaac D'Israeli the inventor of satirical indexes, and he certainly succeeded in producing several ill-natured ones.
When the wits of Christ Church produced under the name of the Hon. Charles Boyle the clever volume with which they thought to annihilate the great Dr. Bentley, Dr. King was the one who assisted by producing a bitter index.
The first edition of Dr. Bentley's Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables of Esop examin'd (1698) has no index; but Dr. King's work was added to the second edition published in the same year. It was styled, A short account of Dr. Bentley by way of Index. Then follows:
"Dr. Bentley's true story of the MS. prov'd false by the testimonies of
—— Mr. Bennet, p. 6.
—— Mr. Gibson, p. 7.
—— Dr. King, p. 8.
—— Dr. Bentley, p. 19."
"Dr. Bentley's civil usage of Mr. Boyle.
"His civil language to
—— Mr. Boyle.
—— Sir W. Temple.
"His singular humanity to
—— Mr. Boyle.
—— Sir Edward Sherburne.
humanity to Foreigners.
"His Ingenuity in
—— relating matters of fact.
—— citing authors.
—— transcribing and plundering
notes and prefaces of
—— Mr. Boyle.
—— Vizzanius.
—— Nevelet.
—— Camerarius.
—— Editor of Hesychius.
—— Salmasius.
—— Dr. Bentley.
"His appeal to Foreigners.
—— a suspicious plan.
—— a false one.
"His modesty and decency in contradicting great men.
"(Long list from Plato to Every body).
"His happiness in confident assertions for want
—— of Reading.
—— of Judgment.
—— of Sincerity.
"His profound skill in Criticism
From beginning to
The End."
This is certainly more vindictive than witty.
All the wits rushed madly into the fray, and Swift, in his "Battel fought last Friday between the Antient and Modern Books in St. James's Library," committed himself irretrievably to the wrong side in this way: "A captain whose name was B-ntl-y, in person the most deformed of all the moderns; tall but without shape or comeliness, large but without strength or proportion. His armour was patched up of a thousand incoherent pieces...."
Then look at the leader of the opposing host: "Boyl clad in a suit of armor which had been given him by all the gods immediately advanced against the trembling foe, who now fled before him."
It is amazing that such a perverted judgment should have been given by some of our greatest writers, but all is to be traced to Bentley's defects of temper, so that Dr. King was not altogether wrong in his index.
Sir George Trevelyan in his Life of Macaulay refers to Bentley's famous maxim (which in print and talk alike he dearly loved to quote), that no man was ever written down except by himself, and quotes what the historian wrote after perhaps his tenth perusal of Bishop Monk's life of the great critic: "Bentley seems to me an eminent instance of the extent to which intellectual powers of a most rare and admirable kind may be impaired by moral defects."
Charles Boyle's book went through four editions, and still there was silence; but at last appeared the "immortal" Dissertation, as Porson calls it, which not only defeated his enemies, but routed them completely. Bentley's Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, with an answer to the objections of the Hon. C. Boyle, Esq., first appeared in 1699. De Quincey described it as one of the three most triumphant dissertations existing upon the class of historico-critical problems, "All three are loaded with a superfetation of evidence, and conclusive beyond what the mind altogether wishes." [7]