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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 victories 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 older 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 defeCis — we discovered but too often 
in the literary feuds directed 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- 
du£l, 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. 
\Ve shall now take a general view of his opponents, and the attacks 
which took place at the fit st period of his reform in Holland ; we will, 
at the same time, communicate all the subsequent contests and feuds 
which his passive condua 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 severe as the sincerest well-wisher and lover of his prosperity, 
was 
