Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/282

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APPENDIX

book shall happen to be preserved anywhere as an useful common place book for ridicule, banter, and all the topics of calumny, this very page about Delphos may, perhaps, before he grows an old man, be made an unwelcome evidence against himself. I see here that the excellent Bishop of Lichfield (who, as appears by his most admirable dictionary to the great Bishop Wilkins's Real Character, has the largest and nicest knowledge of the English language, of any man living) calls it Delphi in his printed, though unpublished, Chronology which I had the honour to see; and so did the learned gentleman Mr Stanley long ago, in his Lives of the Philosophers. I do not here disparage those excellent pens that have, unawares, fallen into the common error; but to defend it against manifest reason, and to vilify those that would reform it, is a plain instance of a positive and pedantic genius.

I must take hold of this occasion to do another "piece of right" to Mr Wotton. For the Examiner says it is hoped Mr W. will publicly declare, that he neither assisted nor approved my Dissertation. But I myself can save him half that labour; and therefore here I do aver that neither Mr Wotton nor any one