It is said not to be honourable to literature to revive such controversies; and a work entitled "Querelles Littéraires," when it first appeared, excited loud murmurs; but it has its moral: like showing the drunkard to a youth, that he may turn aside disgusted with ebriety. Must we suppose that men of letters are exempt from the human passions? Their sensibility, on the contrary, is more irritable than that of others. To observe the ridiculous attitudes in which great men appear, when they employ the style of the fish-market, may be one great means of restraining that ferocious pride often breaking out in the republic of letters. Johnson at least appears to have entertained the same opinion; for he thought proper to republish the low invective of _Dryden_ against _Settle_; and since I have published my "Quarrels of Authors," it becomes me to say no more. The celebrated controversy of _Salmasius_, continued by Morus with _Milton_--the first the pleader of King Charles, the latter the advocate of the people--was of that magnitude, that all Europe took a part in the paper-war of these two great men. The answer of Milton, who perfectly massacred Salmasius, is now read but by the few. Whatever is addressed to the times, however great may be its merits, is doomed to perish with the times; yet on these pages the philosopher will not contemplate in vain. It will form no uninteresting article to gather a few of the rhetorical _weeds_, for _flowers_ we cannot well call them, with which they mutually presented each other. Their rancour was at least equal to their erudition,--the two most learned antagonists of a learned age! Salmasius was a man of vast erudition, but no taste. His writings are learned, but sometimes ridiculous. He called his work _Defensio Regia_, Defence of Kings. The opening of this work provokes a laugh:--"Englishmen! who toss the heads of kings as so many tennis-balls; who play with crowns as if they were bowls; who look upon sceptres as so many crooks." That the deformity of the body is an idea we attach to the deformity of the mind, the vulgar must acknowledge; but surely it is unpardonable in the enlightened philosopher thus to compare the crookedness of corporeal matter with the rectitude of the intellect; yet Milbourne and Dennis, the last a formidable critic, have frequently considered, that comparing Dryden and Pope to whatever the eye turned from with displeasure, was very good argument to lower their literary abilities. Salmasius seems also to have entertained this idea, though his spies in England gave him wrong information; or, possibly, he only drew the figure of his own distempered imagination.