Soon afterwards, Ross, the editor of Cicero’s _Epistolæ Familiares_, and subsequently Bishop of Exeter, ironically showed, in his “Dissertation, in which the defence of P. Sulla, ascribed to Cicero, is clearly proved to be spurious, after the manner of Mr Markland,” that, on the principles and line of argument adopted by his opponent, the authenticity of any one of the orations might be contested. This _jeu d’esprit_ of Bishop Ross was seriously confuted in a “Dissertation, in which the Objections of a late Pamphlet to the Writings of the Ancients, after the manner of Mr Markland, are clearly Answered; and those Passages in Tully corrected, on which some of the Objections are founded.—1746.” This dissertation was printed by Bowyer, and he is generally believed to have been the author of it(341). In Germany, J. M. Gesner, with all the weight attached to his opinion, and _Thesaurus_, strenuously defended these orations in two prelections, held in 1753 and 1754, and inserted in the 3d volume of the new series of the Transactions of the Royal Academy at Gottingen, under the title _Cicero Restitutus_, in which he refuted, one by one, all the objections of Markland. After this, although the Letters of Brutus were no longer considered as authentic, literary men in all countries—as De Brosses, the French Translator of Sallust, Ferguson, Saxius, in his _Onomasticon_, and Rhunkenius—adopted the orations as genuine. Ernesti, in his edition of Cicero, makes no mention of the existence of any doubts respecting them; and, in his edition of Fabricius(342), alludes to the controversy concerning them as a foolish and insignificant dispute. A change of opinion, however, was produced by an edition of the four orations which Wolfius published at Berlin in 1801, to which he prefixed an account of the controversy, and a general view of the arguments of Markland and Gesner. The observations of each, relating to particular words and phrases, are placed below the passages as they occur, and are followed by Wolf’s own remarks, refuting, to the utmost of his power, the opinions of Gesner, and confirming those of Markland. Schütz, the late German editor of Cicero, has completely adopted the notions of Wolf; and by printing these four harangues, not in their order in the series, but separately, and at the end of the whole, along with the discarded correspondence between Cicero and Brutus, has thrown them without the classical pale as effectually as Lambinus excluded the once recognized orations, _In pace_, and _Antequam iret in Exilium_. In the fourth volume of his new edition of the works of Cicero now proceeding in Germany, Beck has followed the opinion of Wolf, after an impartial examination of the different arguments in his notes, and in an _excursus criticus_ devoted to this subject.