Bentley's first 'Dissertation' (1697)
When Wotton was writing his Reflections Bentley, who was one of his personal friends, told him that the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables of Æsop, which Temple had praised so highly, were spurious; and he promised that on some other occasion he would prove his assertion.
In 1697 Wotton told Bentley that he was preparing a second edition of his Reflections, and asked him to fulfil his promise. Not very reluctantly, perhaps, Bentley wrote A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and others; and the Fables of Æsop: and the paper was printed with a separate title-page at the end of Wotton's volume. That there might be no mistake about his intentions, Bentley reprinted at the head of the Dissertation the passage from Temple already referred to. In the Dissertation Bentley examined the Epistles under sixteen different heads. He showed that Phalaris was made in them to speak of things that did not exist in his time, of towns that had not been built or thought of; to quote from books that had not yet been written; to use Attic Greek, although he could only have known
