Note 302 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 3)

A keen repartee! Yet King could read this mighty volume as “a vain confused performance,” but the learned Dodwell declared to “the Bees of Christchurch,” who looked up to him, that “he had never learned so much from any book of the size in his life.” King was as unjust to Bentley, as Bentley to King. Men of genius are more subject to “unnatural civil war” than even the blockheads whom Pope sarcastically reproaches with it. The great critic’s own notion of his volume seems equally modest and just. “To undervalue this dispute about ‘Phalaris,’ because it does not suit one’s own studies, is to quarrel with a circle because it is not a square. If the question be not of vulgar use, it was writ therefore for a few; for even the greatest performances, upon the most important subjects, are no entertainment at all to the many of the world.”—p. 107.