BENTLEY, Richard, one of the greatest critics of modern times, was a native of Oulton in the parish of Rothwell and the West Riding of Yorkshire, and was born on the 27th of January 1662. His ancestors belonged to the higher class of English yeomen. During the civil wars, his grandfather, James Bentley, had been a captain in the royal army, and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, he ended his life as a prisoner in Pontefract Castle. His father, Thomas Bentley, who was the possessor of a small estate at Woodlesford, married, as his second wife, Sarah the daughter of Richard Willie, a stone-mason at Oulton; and their first child was the individual who afterwards rendered the family illustrious. For the first elements even of classical learning he is said to have been indebted to his mother, who is described as a woman of an excellent understanding. After having been a day-scholar at the neighbouring hamlet of Methley, he was sent to the [7:4:575] grammar school of Wakefield, where John Potter, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, likewise received his early education. On the 24th of May 1676, he was entered as a subsizar of St John’s College, which was then the largest in the university of Cambridge: his tutor was Joseph Johnston, and the master of the college Dr Francis Turner, afterwards bishop of Ely. Of the peculiar direction of his academical studies no record has been preserved: that he cultivated classical learning with great energy and perseverance, cannot well be doubted; and we are led to infer that he was far from neglecting the mathematical sciences. Having continued at college for upwards of two years, he became a scholar on the foundation of Dr Dowman; and at the expiration of the third year, he succeeded to one of the Yorkshire scholarships founded by Sir Marmaduke Constable. At the regular period he took the degree of A. B. From a fellowship of his college he was excluded by a provision in the statutes, which prohibited more than two fellows from being chosen from the same county. He was however appointed headmaster of the grammar school of Spalding in Lincolnshire, the nomination to this office having lapsed to the college. On attaining the age of majority, he disposed of his interest in the Oulton property to his brother James, the issue of his father’s first marriage; and the money thus procured he devoted to the purchase of books, which are not less necessary to a scholar than tools to a carpenter. Bentley did not long retain the functions of a schoolmaster; for, after an interval of about twelve months, he became domestic tutor to the son of Dr Stillingfleet, dean of St Paul’s, who had formerly been a fellow of St John’s College. In the month of July 1683 he took the degree of A. Μ. Soon after the Revolution, the eminent merits of Stillingfleet were rewarded with the bishopric of Worcester; and about the same period he sent his son James to the university of Oxford, where both he and his tutor became members of Wadham College. Bentley was incorporated A. Μ. on the 4th of July 1689.

He now projected editions of Greek grammarians and of Latin poets; he indeed pursued an arduous course of study, which gradually prepared him for any department of classical enterprise. The plan which he contemplated as the foundation of his fame was a complete collection of the fragments of the Greek poets. This plan he never executed; but of his competency for such a task he has left sufficient evidence in his collection of the fragments of Callimachus, afterwards communicated to Graevius. At the suggestion, as is supposed, of the very learned Bishop Lloyd, he undertook the stupendous task of publishing a complete edition of the Greek lexicoraphers: but the general design, which was too vast to be properly executed by one individual, appears to have been abandoned after a short interval; and it is much to be regretted that he did not at least publish an edition of Hesychius, an author in whom he professes to have made upwards of five thousand corrections. Of his familiarity with this lexicorapher he exhibited a sufficient specimen in ⅛ s , θ af hest publication, his Epistola ad. cl. v. Joannem Milliurn i S. T. P. subjoined to Dr Hody’s edition of the chronicle of Joannes Malela Antiochenus, which was printed at Oxford in the year 1691. By the publication of this little work, at the age of twenty-nine, he laid the foundation of a high reputation among men of learning.

His next appearance before the public was in the character of a divine. He had received deacon’s orders from Compton, bishop of London, in the year 1690, and soon afterwards had been appointed one of the bishop of Worcester s chaplains. In 1692 the four trustees, one of whom was Evelyn, honoured him with the first nomination t0 β °yle’s lectureship. The eight discourses which he preached in consequence of this appointment, embrace a confutation of atheism: they are in a great degree directed against the principles of Hobbes and Spinoza, which have too certain a tendency to atheism, although they are not professedly atheistical; and Bentley claims the merit of having been the first to display the discoveries of Newton in a popular form, and to explain their irresistible force in the proof of a Deity. His reputation was greatly augmented by the publication of his lectures; of which the sixth edition, including other three discourses, was printed at Cambridge in the year 1735. The lectures were translated into Latin by Jablonski, who was himself a writer of distinguished learning. Nor did the merit of the author remain without its reward: in 1692, soon after he had taken priest’s orders, he obtained a prebend in the cathedral of Worcester; and in the course of the following year, he succeeded Henry de Justel as keeper of the king’s library. In 1694 he was again appointed to preach the Boyle lectures, and he then selected as their subject the defence of Christianity against infidels; but this series of discourses his friends could not prevail upon him to publish, nor has it been ascertained that the manuscript is still preserved. In the following year, his patron the bishop of Worcester gave him the rectory of Hartlebury, to be held till his old pupil should arrive at the canonical age. The interest of the same worthy prelate had, about this period, procured him the nomination of chaplain in ordinary to the king. It must be recqrded as an instance of scandalous ingratitude, that, when the bishop’s grandson Benjamin Stillingfleet was left an orphan, and was sent in the humble capacity of a sizar to Trinity College, Bentley refused to give him a fellowship, and preferred several competitors of inferior attainments. At the beginning of the year 1696, he ceased to reside in the bishop’s house in Park-street, Westminster, and took possession of the librarian’s apartments in St James’s Palace; and in the month of July lie took the degree of D. D. at Cambridge.

Dr Bentley was now making a rapid approach to the full height of his literary fame; and his principal efforts were more the result of accidental excitements than of his own deliberate plans. In the year 1692 Sir William Temple, one of the most fashionable writers of the age, had published an Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, in which he strenuously opposed the opinions of Fontenelle and Perrault, who had given a very decided preference to the moderns. But his own learning was inadequate to so serious an undertaking, and his commendation of the ancients is therefore of very doubtful value. Of his mode of estimating the merit of modern writers, it has been justly mentioned as a curious specimen, that the names of Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and Newton, have not found a place in his essay. In confirmation of his position, that the oldest books extant are still the best of their kind, he produces the Fables of Aesop and the Epistles of Phalaris, which he believed to be the most ancient pieces of prose written by profane authors. And in reference to the work which bears the name of the ancient tyrant, he is pleased to remark, “I think he must have little skill in painting, that cannot find out this to be an original.” The attention thus directed to Phalaris seems to have suggested the expediency of a new edition; and the dean of Christ Church, Dr Aldrich, committed the task of editing his epistles to the Honourable Charles Boyle, brother to the earl of Orrery; a young gentleman of pleasing manners, and of a relish for learning creditable to his age and station. On his admission at Christ Church, he was placed under the tuition of Atterbury, who, if not a profound, was at least an elegant scholar. In his editorial labours he was aided by his private tutor John Freind, [7:4:576]then one of the junior students, and afterwards a physician of no small celebrity. The editor of Phalaris wished to procure a collation of a manuscript belonging to the royal library; but, instead of making any direct application to the librarian, he had recourse to the agency of Thomas Bennet, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard, who appears to have executed his commission with no extraordinary degree of zeal or dispatch. In order to conceal his own negligence, he is supposed to have misrepresented the entire transaction to his employers at Oxford; and the preface to Mr Boyle’s edition of Phalaris, published in the year 1695, contains a sarcastic reflection on Bentley for his want of civility. To the editor he immediately addressed a letter, explaining the real circumstances of the case; but instead of receiving an answer in the spirit of conciliation, he was given to understand that he might seek redress in any way he pleased. It is however dangerous to take a lion by the beard.

Dr Wotton, his friend and fellow-collegian, had recently engaged in the controversy respecting the comparative excellence of the ancients and moderns; and after he had sent to the press his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, Bentley happened to state, in the course of their conversation, and in reference to the extravagant commendation bestowed by Sir William Temple, “that the Epistles of Phalaris are spurious, and that we have nothing now extant of Aesop’s own composition.” This casual remark was converted into a promise that he would furnish a written statement of his opinion, to be added to the second edition of the Reflections. To the second edition, which appeared in 1697, was accordingly subjoined Dr Bentley’s “Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and others, and the Fables of Aesop.” Of the spuriousness of all the productions thus enumerated, his demonstration is by every competent judge admitted to be very complete; but his most vigorous efforts are directed against the Epistles of Phalaris. After having produced the chronological proofs of their spurious origin, he considers the language, and next the matter, of the Epistles, and concludes with an argument drawn from what he calls their late appearance in the world. This work certainly betrays some symptoms of hasty composition; but the number of mistakes or oversights which his adversaries were capable of detecting was surprisingly small. The entire disputation is managed with great learning, and with sagacity not inferior to his learning. The contemptuous strain of Bentley’s animadversion excited great indignation in the members of Christ Church; and an answer was speedily prepared by a confederacy, which, however deficient in critical learning, was by no means deficient in self-esteem. The leaders were Francis Atterbury and George Smalridge, both of whom were afterwards elevated to the episcopal bench: Robert Freind, afterwards head-master of Westminster school, his brother John Freind, and Anthony Alsop, all students of Christ Church, are generally understood to have lent their aid. The share of Atterbury is sufficiently ascertained from a passage in one of bis letters to Boyle, in which he reminds him that, “in writing more than half the book, in reviewing a good part of the rest, and in transcribing the whole, half a year of his life had passed away.”^[1. Atterbury’s Epistolary Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 21. ]

The motley production, bearing the title of “Dr Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables of Aesop, examined by the Honourable Charles Boyle, Esq. was published in the year 1698; and in the following year Bentley published “A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, with an Answer to the Objections of the Honourable Charles Boyle, Esquire.” They are both in the octavo form; the former extending to about 300 pages, and the latter to 655. The wits of Christ Church were overwhelmed with an immense mass of learning, and that so well digested, and animated with so much spirit, that it would be difficult to mention many critical works worthy of being compared with Bentley’s Dissertation. His learning was superior, immeasurably superior, to that of the Oxford combination; nor did they find him inferior in the use of their now weapons of wit and sarcasm. Bentley’s wit is not without a certain tinge of rusticity, but it is nevertheless full of poignancy. He everywhere maintains an air of undaunted confidence, and he doubtless felt for his adversaries that contempt which he so strongly expressed. As he has incidentally discussed many different topics of classical erudition, his work is interesting and valuable even to those who may not deem the principal question of much importance. The extent of his learning, and the dexterity with which he applies it to every subject that presents itself, are not more conspicuous than the intuitive sagacity of his conjectural emendations.

This controversy produced an ample number of tracts, which are chiefly anonymous, and have little intrinsic merit. On the side of Bentley’s nominal antagonist, prejudice, as well as fashion, was strongly arrayed. It is not a little curious to read the following couplet in Garth’s Dispensary, and to compare the partial estimate of contemporaries with the mature decision of posterity.
So diamonds take a lustre from their foil
And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle.

But it is only by himself that an author can be written down. A confederacy of wit and fashion may for a certain time succeed in exalting one writer above, and in depressing another below, his proper standard; but as no large community of men is without a latent sense of justice, no attempt of this nature can be attended with ultimate success; nor is it more certain that heavy or light bodies will sink or float according to their specific gravity, than that the reputation of good and bad writers will finally maintain some perceptible relation to their actual desert.

When Bentley produced this singular work, he was in the thirty-eighth year of his age. His literary merit, though not duly appreciated by the public, was well known to the most competent judges; and on the promotion of Dr Montague to the deanery of Durham, he was recommended to the vacant office of master of Trinity College, Cambridge. To this office he was admitted on the first of February 1700, and was thus placed in a situation of dignity and emolument; but his appointment was unpopular from the beginning, and his administration was marked by a series of the most flagrant acts of rapacity, injustice, and oppression. On the 4th of January 1701, he married Joanna the daughter of Sir John Bernard, Bart, of Brampton in the county of Huntingdon. In the course of the same year, Bishop Patrick bestowed upon him the archdeaconry of Ely, which, being endowed with the two livings of Haddenham and Wilburton, was an office of emolument as well as dignity. The residue of his ecclesiastical history we shall compress within the compass of a few sentences. His stall at Worcester he had resigned in 1700. In 1709 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the bishopric of Chichester. In 1717 he was elected regius professor of divinity. In 1724 he refused the bishopric of Bristol, and in 1730 the deanery of Lincoln[7:4:577]. If he had not disgraced himself by the indecent violence of his conduct, he would in all probability have ìttained to one of the highest stations in the church; but the history of his proceedings at Cambridge presents a ⅛kening detail, which is happily unparalleled in the academical annals of the united kingdom. His great prosperity, operating upon the native arrogance of his disposition, and unattended by the salutary restraint of religious feeling, seems to have produced a total disregard of every consideration except those of his own power and interest. His government of Trinity College was that of an unprincipled despot. In the course of three years, he had no fewer than six lawsuits before the court of king’s bench; and these animosities and contentions, injurious to the university, and scandalous to the church, commenced in the vigour of his manhood, and were only terminated with his long life.

Some of the fellows of the college made repeated and strenuous attempts to procure his removal from the office of master. Their first petition, dated in February 1709- 10, was addressed to Dr Moore, bishop of Ely, as visitor of Trinity College; and among the thirty fellows who subscribed it was the celebrated Conyers Middleton, who afterwards proved the most formidable of his literary antagonists. After many proceedings of a preliminary nature, the cause at length obtained a hearing at Ely House in the year 1714, and was before the court for the period of six weeks. The visitor came to the conclusion that the charges of wasting the goods and violating the statutes of the college had been sufficiently established; and he accordingly directed a sentence of ejectment from the mastership to be prepared in due form; but having caught cold in consequence of his long sittings in the hall, he was seized with an illness which terminated fatally before judgment could be pronounced. To his successor in the see of Ely, Dr Fleetwood, fresh articles of accusation were speedily presented by one of the fellows, Edmond Miller, serjeant at law, subscribed by him “in the name and behalf of many of the fellows but the bishop declined to take cognizance of the cause, apd a petition, subscribed by nineteen fellows, was in 1716 presented to the king. This attempt likewise proved ineffectual; and Dr Greene having succeeded to the bishopric of Ely, a petition was presented to him in the year 1729. The promoter in this suit was Robert Johnson, B. D., one of the fellows; and the articles of accusation, which are sixty-four in number, embrace almost all the material events in the history of the college for the space of eighteen years.^[2. See Bishop Monk’s Life of Richard Bentley, D. D. Lond. 1830, 4to. ] The final decision of the visitor was preceded by much litigation in the king’s bench and house of lords; but at length, on the 27th of April 1734, he pronounced sentence of deprivation against the master, for dilapidating the goods and violating the statutes of the college. Bentley’s usual intrepidity and address did not forsake him on so critical an occasion; and he placed his chief reliance on the very defective provision of the fortieth statute, according to which a master, convicted before the visitor of any of the greater offences there specified, is immediately to be deprived by the vice-master of the college. Soon after the sentence had been pronounced, his devoted adherent Br Walker was appointed to this office. Notwithstanding various applications to the court of king’s bench, the sentence was never carried into execution; and Bishop Greene dying in the year 1738, the course of nature, and not of law, put a period to the contest. In this protracted and complicated suit the master’s share of the expenses amounted to no less than four thousand pounds; and this sum he had no scruple in drawing from the funds of the college.

In addition to these disgraceful contentions with his own college, he engaged in a violent contention with the university. During the royal visit of 1717, several doctors of divinity were created by mandate; and on the performance of the ceremony by Dr Bentley as regius professor, he made an unauthorized demand of four guineas from each candidate. One of these was Dr Middleton, who paid the fee, and .afterwards brought an action for its recovery in the vice-chancellor’s court. The professor was convicted of contempt, and was deprived of all his degrees, which were only restored in consequence of a mandamus from the king’s bench.

Soon after the first petition against him had been presented to the bishop of Ely, he had sufficient energy of mind to compose one of his most remarkable works, his Emendationes in Menandri et Philemonis Reliquias, in which Le Clerc is treated with the most caustic severity. Under the borrowed name of Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, they were committed to the press by Burman,^[3. Trajecti ad Rhennm, i7iθ, 8vo. ] who was a willing agent on such an occasion. His next literary enterprise was his famous edition of Horace, which was printed at Cambridge, and was completed in the year 1711. In 1713, Anthony Collins published his Discourse of Free-thinking; and his work was followed by several answers, but the most effective of these was Dr Bentley’s “Remarks upon a late Discourse of Free-thinking, in a Letter to F. FI. D. D., by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis.” The friend thus designated in the title-page was Francis Hare, D. D., who was then dean of Worcester, and was afterwards successively bishop of St Asaph and Chichester. Collins’s superficial learning was exposed with unrelenting severity, and his arrogance was repelled by the most arrogant of mankind. Even the most pious may sometimes do well to be angry; but when a religion, breathing peace and gentleness, is defended in the worst spirit of its enemies, the cause of truth is but imperfectly promoted. Bentley’s remarks were however written with much ability, and were received with much applause; nor did he leave his adversary the same power of imposing on the ignorant and unwary. In 1720 he issued proposals for publishing a critical edition of the Greek Testament, which were attacked by Dr Middleton with much ability, and perhaps with virulence not inferior to his ability. There is little or no reason to believe that his scheme was defeated by this angry exposure: he long afterwards reverted to the plan of such an edition; nor were his nerves so infirm, or his mind so unaccustomed to the utmost bitterness of invective, as to render it probable that he could be deterred by any literary opposition, however formidable. His edition of Terence and of Phaedrus was published at Cambridge in 1726. At the suggestion of Queen Caroline, he afterwards undertook to prepare an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost;^[4. Lond. 1732, 4to. ] a task for which he was neither qualified by the elegancĉ of his taste nor by the course of his previous studies; and, of all his literary enterprises, this was the most injudicious and most unsuccessful. It greatly contributed to impair his general reputation as a critic; for many readers, unprepared to judge of his violent distortions in the text of Horace, were sufficiently prepared to judge of his violent distortions in the text of Milton; and certainly those who were left to form an opinion of his literary merits from the mere inspection of his lucubrations on the English poet, [7:4:578]could not but be astonished at his former renown. He resorts to the extraordinary device of introducing an imaginary editor, whom he chooses to represent as having not merely committed many unintentional errors, but even as having made various additions according to his own judgment or caprice. Another labour of his declining years was a projected edition of Homer; and it is deeply to be regretted that he did not relinquish more unprofitable pursuits, and devote himself to an undertaking so worthy of his name and reputation; but his literary projects were numerous, and his thoughts must often have been distracted by the perpetual succession of his quarrels and contentions. One object to which he directed much of his attention was the poet’s versification, of which he proposed to effect a general restoration, derived from ancient manuscripts, the examination of the numerous quotations dispersed in ancient writers, and, beyond all other sources, the systematic insertion of the Aeolic digamma. His edition of Manilius, which he had prepared about forty-five years before, was published in 1739, under the superintendence of his nephew, Richard Bentley, D. D.

The death of Bishop Greene, in 1738, had relieved him from the hazard of deposition; and he continued to enjoy his offices till 1742, when he died on the 14th of July, after having completed the eightieth year of his age. His wife had died two years before. His only surviving son, who bore the same name, was educated to no profession: it was one of the many scandalous acts of the father’s administration, that the son was elected a fellow of Trinity College at the age of fifteen. The younger Bentley, who was considered as a man of excellent talents, was the author of several works, but is best remembered as the friend of Gray. When his father once found him reading a novel, “Why,” said he, “read a book which you cannot quote?” The doctor’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Joanna, were both married: the latter was the wife of Denison Cumberland, who was grandson to the learned bishop of Peterborough, and who himself became bishop of Kilmore, and the father of Richard Cumberland, one of the most eminent of the recent English dramatists.

The principal works published during the author’s lifetime have already been enumerated; but we must not neglect to mention the posthumous collection entitled “Richardi Bentleii et doctorum Virorum Epistolae partim mutuae. Acccdit Richardi Dawesii ad Joannem Taylorum Epistola singularis.” Lond. 1807, 4to. Of this splendid volume two hundred copies were printed at the expense of the late Dr Burney, not with any view to publication, but as presents from the munificent editor. An enlarged edition of the same collection has very recently been printed in a more accessible form: “Richardi Bentleii et doctorum Virorum Epistolae partim mutuae: ex editione Londinensi Caroli Burncii repetiit, novisque additamentis, et Godofredi Hermanni Disscrtatione de Bentleio ejusque Ed. Terentii, auxit Frid. Traug. Friedemann.” Lipsiae, 1825, 8vo. (x.)