The famous editor of Demosthenes, John Taylor, D. D. being accused of saying Bishop Warburton was no scholar, denied it, but owned he always thought so. Upon this Warburton called him “The Learned Dunce.” When Parr, in the British Critic for 1795, called Porson “a giant in literature,” and “a prodigy in intellect,” the Professor took it in dudgeon, and said, “What right has any one to tell the height of a man he cannot measure?” A Dutch commentator having called Bentley “Egregius” and “Ὁ πάνυ,” “What right, (said the Doctor) has that fellow to quote me; “does he think that I will set my pearls in his dunghill?” Baxter, in the second edition of his Horace, said the great Bentley seemed to him “rather to have buried Horace under a heap of rubbish than to have illustrated him.” And
BENTLEY SAID OF JOSHUA BARNES,
Who, to please his religious wife, composed a Greek ode to prove King Solomon wrote Homer’s Iliad, that he was
“Ὅνος πρὸς λύραν—Asinus ad Lyram:”
Joshua replied, that they who said this of him had not understanding enough to be poets, or wanted the Ὁ νοῦς πρὸς λύραν.
SIR BUSICK AND SIR ISAAC AGAIN.
I have before spoken of these two Cambridge knights and rival physicians, but there yet remains to be told of them, that on their meeting each other, perchance, in the street or the senate house, the latter addressing his rival in an ironical speech of condolence, to the effect, “I regret to hear you are ill, Sir Busick.” “Sir, I sick!” (Sir Isaac) retorted the wit, “I never was better in my life!” Many of my readers have no doubt seen the anecdote of Voltaire’s building a church, and causing to be engraved on the front thereof, the vain record,
“Voltaire erexit hoc Templum Deo.”
A similar spirit seized a Mr. Cole of Cambridge, who left money either to erect the church or the steeple of St. Clement’s, in Bridge-street, of that town, on condition that his name was placed on the front of it. The condition was complied with to the letter, thus, by the tasteful judgment of some Cambridge wag:—