cairo,' 717-722; the romantic lines, 763-766; the fleet to which Satan is compared, ii., 635; Scylla and the Lapland witches, 660-665; the bridge built by Sin and Death; the limbo in the Third Book; the rich passage about the celebrated gardens of the world, iv., 267; the Phoenix, v., 269; the noble lines about the Creation- 'Now half appeared The tawny lion, struggling to get free His hinder parts; then springs as broke from bonds, 'From Eve compared to a wood-nymph, ix., 386; the gorgeous geographical sketch of the Eastern and African empires, Cambalu seat of Cathaian Khan,' xi., 586. Such are some of the passages which this remorseless critic branded as unworthy of Milton. The last exquisitely affecting and musical lines, They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, were thus flattened, and all their sweetness crushed out- Through Eden took, with heavenly comfort cheer'd.' Thus did this singular man, in the mere arrogance of superior intellect, risk his reputation on so extravagant a hazard; and at that period of life when paradox usually loses its attraction, and the mind courts the calmness and the dignity of repose, rush headlong into a new field of strife, on which he was sure not only to be taken at disadvantage by all his old enemies, but to encounter in hostile array all the most sacred feelings and wounded prejudices of the literary public. The Bishop has declined to sum up the moral character of Bentley, and has left the reader to form his own judgment from the plain and unvarnished narrative of his life. His lordship's reasons for departing from the usual custom of biographers are creditable both to his judgment and to his Christian feelings. I have another reason for my unwillingness to descant further upon the particulars of Bentley's character: it appears to me that his passions were not always under the control, nor his actions under the guidance of Christian principles; that in consequence, pride and ambition, the faults to which his nature was most exposed, were suffered to riot without restraint; aud that hence proceeded the display of arrogance, selfishness, obstinacy, and oppression, by which it must be confessed that his career was disfigured. That nature, however, had not denied to him certain amiable qualities of the heart, and that he possessed, in a considerable degree, many of the social and endearing virtues, is proved beyond a doubt, by the warm and steady affection with which he was regarded by his family and his intimate friends.' This is a remarkable part of Bentley's character. The troubled sea of his public life is singularly contrasted with the calm happiness of his domestic circle. Bentley was fortunate in his wife, an excellent and sensible woman, and in his children, and seems to have been looked up to with most ardent affection by a few intimate friends. Yet this is by no means an unusual character. An arrogant and overbearing is often a good-natured man. When his pride neither encounters nor apprehends opposition, the gentler and better qualities of the heart have free play. Had Bentley succeeded in establishing his despotism over his college without resistance, it would probably have been an easy, and, on the whole, neither an unhappy nor an inglorious sway. His pride, in fact, lay at the bottom of all his disasters, of all his faults; it was the one inherent vice of his constitution. It gave insolence to his manners, coarseness to his language. It was pride, rather than rapacity, which led to his most questionable proceedings about the college property-the pride of being no less superior as a man of business than as a man of letters, the pride of management, of address in overpowering difficulty, of making men of all orders, bakers and stewards as well as bursars and senior fellows, act according to his imperious will. Perhaps pride rather than revenge actuated him even in his vexatious and interminable litigations as the good old Scotch lady, in Galt's clever novel, the Entail, (if so unclassical an illustration be pardonable,) having once, by accident, strayed into success in a legal cause, considered herself ever after as the highest authority on points of law-so Bentley may have been tempted by his first success to set an overweening value on his own legal skill and discrimination. Finally, nothing but his immeasurable pride could have induced him so entirely to set public opinion at defiance, as in his prominent situation as Professor of Divinity and Master of a College, entirely to neglect his religious duties, and rarely to make his appearance in the chapel.* But *Arbuthnot, in his clever supplementary chapter to Gulliver's Travels, the state of learning in the empire of Lilliput,' which is aimed throughout at Bentley, and from which Dr. Monk has given some amusing extracts, has likewise this passage on Bentley's disregard of these observances. Swift's humour about the Big and Little Endians,' is admirably caught. As the nation is very much divided about breaking their eggs, which they generally cat in public once a day, at least once in seven days, I desired to know how Bullum behaved himself in this particular, and was told, that he was thought to have an aversion to eggs, for he was never seen to eat any in public but once or twice a year, when his post obliged him to it; at these times he gave orders to have them served up to him ready dressed, and the shells and whites being carefully taken off, he gulped up the yolks in a very indecent manner, and immediately drank a bumper of strong liquor after them to wash the taste out of his mouth and promote the digestion of them. When any one represented to him the ill example of this practice, his answer was, that his modesty could not let him devour eggs in public, when he had so many eyes upon him; that he was not yet determined at which end he ought to break them; M 2 that But while Dr. Monk's silence upon the moral character of Bentley commands our respect, we are disposed to regret that he has also declined to give a general estimate of his literary attainments and services. This strikes us as the only defect of the book, a defect of which we should not have been inclined to complain, had the biographer of Bentley been a less accomplished scholar. Bentley appears to us to have formed a distinct and remarkable epoch in classical knowledge. The Bishop describes him as the founder of a new school of criticism; it would have been well to have pursued this view, and not merely to have contented himself with notices, though in general sound, judicious, and dispassionate, on his separate publications as they appeared during his life. The less learned reader, on closing his lordship's work, may be inclined to inquire, what at last are the fruits of this vigorous, and fertile, and active understanding? what influence has he exercised, even in his own department, on the mind and on the knowledge of his own age, or of posterity? This deficiency we cannot pretend to supply, yet would venture the following cursory observations. One great distinctive mark of Bentley's scholarship was his acute discrimination between the ancient and modern, the genuine and the spurious remains of antiquity. We would not assert that the older scholars, Erasmus, for instance, Scaliger, or Casaubon, were blind to the more glaring instances of imposture, or unsuspectingly admitted to classical honours all works written in the language of the classics; Erasmus had long before doubted the authenticity of Phalaris: but Bentley first struck out rules, for what we may presume to call the study of the internal evidence of authors; first laid the groundwork for this science of criticism, which has been pursued with such remarkable success, even if at times carried beyond its proper bounds, by modern scholars. Bentley is the legitimate critical parent of Wolf and Niebuhr. For we must not suppose that this fine perception of the age of each writing, which is acquired by the true scholar-this acute observation of peculiarities in lan that the shells and whites were insipid, and only fit for children; but for the eggs themselves, he was so far from hating them, that he had a dish at his own table every day. But whether this was truth, or, if they were at his table, whether he ate of them or not, I could never learn.' 6 In the same tract, Bentley's interminable law proceedings are touched with equally happy humour. This engaged him in many quarrels, which he managed in a very odd manner: whenever he thought himself affronted, he immediately flung a great book at his adversary, and, if he could, felled him to the earth; but if his adversary 'stood his ground and flung another book at him, which was sometimes done with great violence, then he complained to the great justiciary, that these affronts were designed to the emperor, and that he was singled out as being the emperor's servant. By this trick he got that great officer to favour him, which made his enemies cautious and him insolent,' guage, guage, in style, in allusion-this felicitous tact for eliciting and combining the circumstantial evidence of classical writings, has no further end than establishing the right to citizenship in some, and excluding others as strangers or barbarians; it is incalculable how much light has been thrown by these inquiries, not only on the whole literary, but even on the civil history of Greece and Rome. With how much higher interest may the great authors be read, since the character of each period has been more clearly defined, and the age and the life of the poet illustrated by his writings, his writings by his life and by his age; how much incidental instruction has been gained, even beyond the improved knowledge of such subjects themselves, by more intimate acquaintance with the niceties of language and the laws of metre-and in all these inquiries how much of the first impulse is owing to the bold and original mind of Bentley! His scheme for an edition of Homer was abandoned, but the germ of all the modern theories on the subject is distinctly developed in his writings. In an article on the Homeric writings, we have ventured to enter our dissent against the prevailing hypothesis of Wolf; but who, at all deeply interested in the writings of the great poet of antiquity, will refuse to acknowledge how infinitely their knowledge has been increased, their delight in the Homeric writings heightened, by the inquiries of that eminent scholar, of Heyne, and of Payne Knight; and what are all these but the acknowledged disciples of Bentley? The whole modern theory of the Homeric versification rests on his discovery of the digamma; and independent of this groundwork of his system, and however imperfect the success of Mr. Knight, who, before the time of Bentley, would have imagined, as he has done, the possibility of restoring the original language in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed? To the knowledge of the origin, the history, the laws, the metrical principles of the Greek drama, the direct contributions as well as the influence of Bentley have been of still more unquestionable value. How complete the obscurity of these questions, before his time, may be estimated by any one who will read the statements of the Christ Church confederacy, who had probably made themselves masters of the current information on the subject; and though so much has been added, especially on the laws of language and metre, by the exquisite sagacity of Porson, the Attic taste of Elmsley, and by Herman-on the history and structure of the drama by Boëckh and Schlegel, and the countless German scholars and writers on æsthetics-yet the Essay on Phalaris remains a standard authority on many of the most important questions relating to the Greek theatre. For though the barrenness of his imagination, the want or contempt of comprehensive and philosophical principles of taste and and judgment, may in some degree have disqualified Bentley for the highest department of poetical criticism, he must have been gifted with a fine and delicate perception of some of the harmonies of Greek poetry. Some of the principles, both of Greek and Latin metre, which he discovered, can scarcely have been entirely wrought out by the technical and mechanical process of observing the peculiarities of structure, and counting the recurrences of syllables; his ear must have derived a most rare and refined pleasure from those measures, which he was the first to reduce to anything like a satisfactory system.* We must content ourselves with these instances; but, in fact, there is no part of ancient literature which has not derived advantage from this spirit of criticism, in which Bentley took the lead, and set the example. Even now, we trace his spirit in the minute researches of Otfried Muller into the early history of the Greek races; and in Niebuhr's bold demolition and re-construction of the Roman history. It is chiefly through him that the acute observation of analogies and discrepancies, in those minute points, which escape the notice of more rapid readers; the severe and laborious induction from remote, and apparently unconnected particulars; the profounder penetration into the character and authority of each several author, and every separate writing, are at work, for so much good, and perhaps for some evil, in every department of literature. To his more distinguished English successors in the department of classical criticism, Bentley offers some interesting points, both of resemblance and contrast. In one respect, he differs, to a remarkable degree, in the extent and compass of his literary schemes-however many of these schemes may have remained uncompleted. It is astonishing to what a limited sphere the publications of modern English scholars have confined themselves; they seem to have been spell-bound within the narrow circle of the drama. How little have they done but edit and re-edit a few Greek plays! for, after all, we have no full and complete edition of any of the great dramatists from their hands. Homer, with the exception of Mr. Knight's work; the historians, the philosophers, the orators, (we must except two recent editions of Thucydides,) are left to foreign scholars. The bishop has an extremely amusing anecdote on this subject :-' Dr. Bentley, when he came to town, was accustomed, on his visits to Lord Carteret, sometimes to spend his evenings with his Lordship. One day old Lady Granville reproached her son with keeping the country clergyman, who was with him the night before, till he was intoxicated. Lord Carteret denied the charge; upon which the lady replied, that the clergyman could not have sung in so ridiculous a manner unless he had been in liquor. The truth of the case was, that the singing thus mistaken by her ladyship was Dr. Bentley's endeavour to instruct and entertain his noble friend, by reciting Terence according to the true cantilena of the ancients.' The |