The note shews that the sarcasm is directed against what Swift thought was the pedantic manner in which Bentley gave his quotations. The sentence helps us to decide when this passage was written. Bentley's Dissertation was first published as an Appendix to the second edition of Wotton's Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning in 1697. This was answered by the Christ Church coterie : and then the Dissertation was issued in a separate and more complete form in 1699. But Swift clearly has in view the edition of 1697, in which the citations are almost uniformly given with chapter and verse, which is scarcely ever done in the more complete edition of 1699.