110 



OPPONENTS OF LINN^US. 



republic of literature, it depends on the energy of truth, which is of 

 course the most arduous and the more honourable of the two. Where 

 such viftories are obtained, opponents and rivals are seldom wanting. 

 As Homer had his Zoilus, Luther his Ecks, and Sylvester. 

 Prierias, Bayle his Jurien, Voltaire his Frerons, and Wolf 

 a Lang, and his partner, as antagonists; — how very consistent was it 

 with the order of things, that the young Swede, who rose to the glorious 

 dignity of a reformer, should have had his adversaries too. Without 

 proclaiming him the infallible oracle of the wide range of his science — 

 for he had and must have had his defe6ts — we discovered but too often 

 in the literary feuds direfted against him that spirit which generally 

 animates and characterizes them. The love of truth was used as a 

 cloak, and envy, party-spirit, self-interest, and passion, as chief mo- 

 tives of the controversial disputes of his adversaries. But his con- 

 du61;, amidst those attacks, was more prudent than that of many a great 

 man who either preceded or came after him. Agressions he could 

 not prevent, but he impeded the breaking out of a war, whose burthen 

 must have proved disagreeable, and whose issue could have added 

 no fresh laurels either to his honor or to his merits. 



We shall now ta^e a general view of his opponents, and the attacks 

 which took place at the first period of his reform in Holland; we will, 

 at the same time, communicate all the subsequent contests and feuds 

 which his passive conduft prevented from becoming rancorous struggles. 

 This we will do, that we may hereafter follow, him with uninterrupted 

 quietude in the course of his meritorious life. 



The first whom he dreaded as an enemy, and had afterwards great 

 reason to revere as the sincerest well-wisher and lover of his prosperity, 



was 



