being severe upon other men's mistakes, and their want of exactness therefore may be forgiven them. But Dr Bentley, who professes to give no quarter, should take care not to want any.
His last objection happily arose from contemplating the matter of one single Epistle: the Doctor will now compare the Epistles together and confute one by another. "There is an inconsistency," he says, "between the LIst and the LXIXth, because, in the LIst, Phalaris's wife is dead, and in the LXIXth she is alive again." As if it were necessary that these Epistles should have been written just in the same order that they stand, which is different in the printed copies, from what it is in the MSS., and different in one MS. from what it is in another. Upon such an unreasonable supposition as this, how many inconsistencies might be found in Tully's Epistles? or even in those of St Paul? And yet, if this supposition do not take place, there is no manner of inconsistency between these two Epistles of Phalaris. The penetrating Dr Bentley seems to have had some suspicions that this argument was of itself a little too weak to stand its ground, and therefore has backed it with a
