Of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, was noted in his earliest youth as a prodigy of learning. He was B.A. at 13, and already he had been made the subject of complimentary addresses from many of the scholars of the day. He was commonly called 'the polyglot infant.' His Reflections is a book which, dull as it is, shews an enormous amount of information for a man of 28. But his chief mental endowment was memory: and he is represented as eccentric in conduct. Nichol's Lit. Anecdotes, iv. 253, gives a long list of the encomiums addressed to Wotton as a boy.
Temple's Essay was published in 1692, and the first edition of Wotton's Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning was published in 1694. It professed to be rather a review of the current controversy, than a manifesto on the side of the Moderns, although the whole tendency of the book is in that direction: and, although Wotton treated Temple with respect, he distinctly assumed the attitude of an opponent. In 1695, Boyle's edition of Phalaris appeared: and it was only after this that, when Wotton was preparing a second edition of his Reflections, Bentley came to his help by writing the Dissertation on the spurious epistles ascribed to Phalaris and other equally doubtful writings of the kind. It was issued as an appendix to Wotton's book. Boyle published a reply in 1696: and in 1699 Bentley reissued his Dissertation in a more complete and longer form.