owed their success in life, at least the opportunity of distinguishing themselves, to this kind of school clanship!

From Wakefield, Bentley passed to St. John's College, in Cambridge, where little is known of his studies, excepting that even at that early period he seems to have struck out some of his most valuable discoveries in the metre of the Latin poets; and that, while he was in danger of becoming a disciple of the worst style of English poetry, he had the advantage of studying in the noblest school of English science. He was guilty of some indifferent verses in the falsest taste of Cowley; nor, on the whole, can we venture to regret, as may sometimes have been the case, that in gaining a great scholar, we may have lost a great poet. The higher, the imaginative range of poetry, the mind of Bentley seems to have been not merely incapable of composing, but of conceiving or comprehending; felicitous as he is in catching the intimate spirit, and correcting with the utmost taste, the commonlife, and common-sense verses of the later Greek comedians, of Terence, and of the Epistles and Satires of Horace-in his alterations of the Odes of the Latin lyrist, by no means of a bold or highly fervid style, we think that we detect that coldness and barrenness of imagination-that deadness of poetic feeling, which so utterly disqualified him for the task which he assumed in evil hour, that of editor of Milton. But to such a mind as Bentley's, the more congenial advantage of hearing the lectures of Newton, then Lucasian Professor, must have been inestimable. Though never distinguished by mathematical or scientific attainment, the works of Bentley, more particularly his Boyle Lectures, are good evidence that he had drunk deep from that fountain of knowledge, which was but beginning to pour forth its inexhaustible treasures. The college jealousies and attachments of Bentley, as well as his studies, had probably some influence on his future life. The rancour with which in his after days he was attacked by Johnson,* one of the fiercest, as well as the most successful of his assailants, Dr. Monk traces, with great probability, to some personal collision or jealousy in youth; while his first engagement in controversy was in a great degree connected with another of his contemporaries, the then celebrated, but now almost forgotten (except for the immortal satire of Swift) William Wotton. This youthful prodigy of learning, who at six years of age was able to read and translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; to which, at seven, he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac; who was pronounced, at ten years old, the equal of Hammond and Grotius,' may have been glad to retire, in his great contest, behind the more ample shield of his far less early gifted, but as far

*The author of Aristarchus Anti-Bentleianus.'

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more vigorous and richly accomplished, friend and protector. On account of the restrictions upon the fellowships of St. John's, Bentley failed in obtaining, at that time, a permanent establishment in the University; he retired to the obscure situation and humble employment of schoolmaster in a small town in Lincolnshire. Fortunately for the world of letters, as well as for Bentley himself, perhaps for the peace of the good town of Spalding, (where it is not unamusing to imagine the restless and ambitious spirit of Bentley fretting itself against the bars of his narrow cage,) Bentley was invited to accept the office of private tutor in the family of Stillingfleet, then dean of St. Paul's, and afterwards bishop of Worcester. The advantages of this connexion to both parties, and its influence on Bentley's future life, were of great importance. Stillingfleet was of the highest order of English divines-learned, rational, moderate at the great crisis of the Revolution, he was one of the most distinguished of that party which resisted the arbitrary measures of the Crown, and the high station which he held brought him into close connexion with the great Whig leaders. In the active controversies in which Stillingfleet was engaged, we can scarcely suppose but that Bentley was of considerable service to his patron; while to the young scholar, the command of Stillingfleet's library, described as one of the best private collections, and of sufficient importance to be recommended as a purchase to the Crown, was an invaluable privilege; and the society to which he must have been admitted, as well as the influence of his patron, probably fixed the bias of Bentley's mind to that political party to which, excepting for one period of convenient apostacy, he adhered through life. His literary fame owed a still further debt to the patronage of Stillingfleet. He accompanied his son to Oxford in the same capacity of private tutor, where he not only formed valuable acquaintances with the leading classical and theological scholars of that University, but found ample time to avail himself of the manuscript treasures of the Bodleian library. Here his patient industry, his unwearied application, and his perfect command over the whole range of classical literature, began to develop themselves in schemes, the extent and labour of which might have appalled the most practised scholar, but which the conscious strength and self-confidence of Bentley contemplated with the utmost composure. The first of these was a complete collection of the fragments of the Greek poets, a work which all the industry of later scholars has not yet supplied.

'That this design was abandoned, has always been a subject of regret among scholars; nevertheless he had reasons for relinquishing

it, the validity of which it is impossible to deny. Such a work, however desirable, would not have been attended with advantages commensurate with the necessary labour and research; and since no degree of diligence could have ensured the same attention to all the poets in this multifarious assemblage, some inequality must have been observable in the performance; and the object itself would be better answered by several editors, each peculiarly versed in his own author, annexing to the entire works of the poets the broken and scattered fragments of those which have perished.'

Without questioning the justice of these remarks, or impugning the high authority of Dr. Monk on this subject, when we call to mind the great proportion of Bentley's life which was wasted in unprofitable squabbles, and interminable litigation, we may still lament that it was not devoted to this more peaceful, and surely more becoming and praiseworthy occupation. Even if this great collection, the extent of which is perhaps best described in Bentley's own words, Relliquias omnis Græcæ poeseos, philosophicæ, epicæ, elegiacæ, dramaticæ, lyricæque, colligere voluimus,' had been less perfectly executed in some parts than in others, it would have formed the groundwork on which successive editors might have laboured in their separate departments, and at length we might have been able, at one view, to survey the whole sublime, though melancholy, ruins of Grecian invention and intellect. Much unquestionably has been done according to the plan commended by Dr. Monk; little probably will ever be added to the collections of fragments appended to the best editions of the great poets whose works are extant. But we likewise want the collected fragments of those who are known to us only by name. However we may be unable to judge of their genius or powers, by the few scattered lines which may be brought together, the lover of Greek poetry would be grateful even for this scanty florilegium. We are neither ignorant nor forgetful how much has been already done in this department, in the admirable edition, for instance, of the fragments of Empedocles, by Sturz, and in the other single volumes which are perpetually sent over from Germany, or of an excellent commencement to the works of the lyric poets, containing the fragments of Sappho and Alcæus, but which we fear that we must not hope to see completed by the same hand, printed in the Cambridge Museum Criticum. We wish that Professor Gaisford would be tempted to add a volume of this nature to his excellent edition of the Minor Greek Poets. But there is one class of poets which Bentley was so pre-eminently qualified to amend and to illustrate, and of which we are yet labouring under the want of a correct and critical edition, the later comic writers, that we shall never cease to regret

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the abandonment at least of this part of the undertaking. It is well known that Cumberland is supposed to have profited by some manuscript collections of his grandfather,* in his admirable translations of some of those fragments. But a complete edition of the whole remains of the later, if not of the whole range of Attic comedy, with all the richness of illustration, and knowledge of Athenian manners, language, and customs, which Bentley would have poured forth with his accustomed prodigality, would have contributed, in no ordinary degree, not merely to our better acquaintance with the common-life poetry of Athens, but with the Athenians themselves, with their daily habits, manners, usages, sentiments, opinions.

The other gigantic work proposed by Bentley was a complete edition of the lexicographers, an undertaking as useful as laborious, though not likely to extend his fame beyond the very highest class of the learned. But however high the ambition of Bentley, his first publication fully established his claim to this confidence in his own powers and attainments. The celebrated Epistle to Dr. Mill appeared, appended to an edition of a worthless chronicler of the worst age of Byzantine literature, John Malalas, an edition of whose work had been prepared by Chilmead, and was completed by Hody. Even the patience of Bentley could not, a second time, wade through the dreary pages of this writer, at once tedious and inaccurate; his Epistle therefore, instead of confining itself to the author which it professed to illustrate, branched out into a multitude of questions, and seemed intended to display the author's boundless range of erudition. From the Orphic poetry and the later Platonists it sprang at once to the Greek drama, with the whole history of which, its more obscure, as well as more celebrated authors, and the names of dramas which lurk in the most neglected scholiast or imperfect collector of fragments, it displayed an intimate familiarity unknown in that age of scholarship; it descended to the corrupted pages of the lexicographer-on every point it spoke with the same bold and peremptory tone, justified only by the unprecedented ingenuity with which the author struck sense, and sometimes beauty, out of the most corrupt and apparently impracticable passages. He seemed gifted with an intuitive sagacity not merely to detect error, but to trace the source of it -words which seem thrown together at random, receive sense and meaning at one touch of his wand. For those readers who, though

* Sir Walter Scott, in his very amusing Lives of the Novelists, has fallen into two errors on this subject. He states that the celebrated translations from the Greek Comic Poets appeared in the Connoisseur-it should be the Observer;' and instead of acknowledging that he owed them to Richard Bentley, Cumberland always stoutly asserted, and with every appearance of truth, that they were his own.

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they may have cultivated Greek literature, have paid little attention to philology, let us subjoin a single specimen of the singular dexterity and success with which a consummate critic may thus fairly obtain useful information from words, of which the sense may appear irretrievably lost. In the Lexicon of Hesychius appeared this unmeaning gibberish:—έναστρος, ὡς τεμένας, αχαιός ἀλφεσιβοίαι ἀντὶ τοῦ ὑαστὰς γὰρ βάκχας ὑάδας ἔλεγον. " Prodigiosa plane oratio (this is Bentley's comment)-nunc vicissim & muta in at et lege, έναστρος ὥστε Μαινας Αχαιός Αλφεσιβοίᾳ" αντὶ τῆ Υάς τὰς γὰρ Βακχας Χαδας ἔλεγον.” From this unintelligible mass of words we have thus obtained the name of a drama, that of its author, and a piece of information by no means without value to the history of mythology. On the whole, it might be fairly asserted of the Epistle to Mill, that no work of classical criticism had yet appeared since the revival of letters, which in the same number of pages contained such variety of information, so many happy emendations, or which so clearly showed that a new school of criticism was about to commence, which would own Bentley as its legitimate parent.*

Scarcely had Bentley thus established his fame in this department of letters, than he as suddenly broke forth in a still higher, with equal strength and with the same characteristic excellencies and demerits. In the following year appeared his Confutation of Atheism;' the first series of the lectures founded by Robert Boyle. In these sermons, which formed a complete system of Natural Theology, opposed to the prevailing school of Atheism or Epicurism, Bentley displayed the same comprehensive knowledge, not only of the philosophy of the ancient schools, which he had before shown of the most abstruse classic writers, but of the science of his own age in almost every department. The Newtonian System, then but in the dawn of its authority, was seized with avidity, developed with masterly skill, and, with some few corrections by its mighty master, with surprising accuracy, and brought to bear upon the great question-the providential government of the world. The Seventh and Eighth Sermons of the series comprise this part of the subject, and have never been surpassed, at least in vigour and perspicuity, by any of the powerful writers who have done the same homage to the established fame of Newton, which Bentley has the credit of having offered, with the decision of a kindred mind, before his supremacy was generally acknowledged. In the style and composition of these sermons, the character

* We must be excused if we were tempted to a smile by the gravity with which Dr. Monk vindicates the dignity of the Principal of St. Edmund Hall from the familiarity of Bentley. In one place he accosts him 'Iwavvidior-an indecorum which neither the familiarity of friendship, nor the license of a dead language can justify towards the dignified head of a house.' We do not defend the taste of the passage.

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