feud, no matter who began it, which will show Bentley's title to the benefit of the rule we have proposed. People, not nice in distinguishing, are apt to confound all the parties to a feud under one common sentence: and, whatever difference they might allow in the grounds of quarrel, as to temper, at least, and charity, where all were confessedly irritated and irritating, they allow of none. But, in fact, between Bentley and his antagonists, the differences were vital. Bentley had a good heart; generally speaking, his antagonists had not. Bentley was overbearing, impatient of opposition, insolent, sometimes tyrannical. He had, and deservedly, a very lofty opinion of himself; he either had, or affected, too mean a one of his antagonists. Sume superbiam quæsitam meritis, was the motto which he avowed. Coming to the government of a very important college, at a time when its discipline had been greatly relaxed, and the abuses were many. his reforms (of which some have been retained even to this day) were pushed with too high a hand; he was too negligent of any particular statute that stood in his way; showed too harsh a disregard to the feelings of gentlemen; and too openly disdained the arts of conciliation. Yet this same man was placable in tne highest degree; generous; and, at the first moment when his enemies would make an opening for him to be so, forgiving. His literary quarrels, which have left the impression that he was irritable or jealous, were (without one exception) upon his part mere retorts to the most insufferable provocations; and though it is true, that when once teased into rousing himself out of his lair, he did treat his man with rough play, left him ugly remembrances of his leonine power, and

made himself merry with his distressed condition; yet on the other hand, in his utmost wrath, there was not a particle of malice. How should there? As a scholar, Bentley had that happy exemption from jealousy, which belongs almost inevitably to conscious power in its highest mode. Reposing calmly on his own supremacy, he was content that pretenders of every size and sort should flutter through their little day, and be carried as far beyond their natural place as the intrigues of friends or the caprice of the public could effect. Unmolested, he was sure never to molest. Some people have a letch for unmasking impostors, or for avenging the wrongs of others. Porson, for example — what spirit of mischief drove him to intermeddle with Mr. Archdeacon Travis? How Quixotic again in appearance how mean in his real motive. was Dr. Parr's defence of Leland and Jorton; or, to call it by its true name, Dr. Parr's attack upon Bishop Hurd! But Bentley had no touch of this temper. When instances of spurious pretensions came in his way, he smiled grimly and good-naturedly in private, but forbore (sometimes after a world of provocations) to unmask them to the public.*

Some of his most bitter assailants, as Kerr, and Johnson of Nottingham, he has not so much as mentioned; and it remains a problem to this day, whether, in his wise love of peace, he forbore to disturb his own equanimity by reading the criticisms of a malignant enemy, or, having read them, generously refused to crush the insulter. Either way, the magnanimity was equal for a man of weak irritability is as little able to abstain from hearkening after libels upon himself, as he is from retorting them. Early in life (Epist. ad

Mill.) Bentley had declared

• Non nostrum est κειμένοις

neußairs' It is no practice of mine to trample upon the prostrate; and his whole career in literature reflected a commentary upon that maxim. To concede, was to disarm him. How opposite the temper of his enemies! One and all, they were cursed with bad tempers, and unforgiving hearts. Cunningham, James Gronovius, and Johnson, Conyers Middleton, and Colbatch, all lost their peace of mind — all made shipwreck of their charity during the progress of this dispute; some of them for life. But from Bentley, whether wrong or right, as to the materia litis, the manner of conducting it drew no qualities but those which did him honor; great energy; admirable resources and presence of mind; the skill and address of a first-rate lawyer; and courage nearly unparalleled under the most disastrous turns of the case, those even, which, on two memorable occasions, (the deprivation of his degrees, and his ejection from the mastership of Trinity College,) seemed to have consigned him to ruin. In the very uttermost hurly-burly of the storm, it is not upon record that Bentley's cheerfulness forsook him for a day. At a time when Colbatch and Middleton were standing before judges as convicted delinquents, absconding from arrests, surrendering to jailers, sneaking to the great men's levees, or making abject interest for the reversion of some hollow courtier's smile, or an insinuation of his treacherous promise, Bentley was calmly pursuing his studies in his castle of the Master's Lodge of Trinity College; sat on unconcernedly even after public officers were appointed to pull him out; and never allowed the good humor of his happy fireside to be disturbed by the

quarrels which raved outside. He probably watched the proceedings of the enemy,' with the same degree of interest with which we all read the newspapers during a foreign war: and the whole of the mighty process, which the bad passions of the other faction made gall and wormwood to them, to him appears to have given no more than the pleasurable excitement of a game of chess.

Having thus bespoke the favorable opinion of our readers for Dr. Bentley, and attempted to give that impulse to the judgments upon his conduct, which the mere statement of the circumstances would not always suggest, until after a large examination of the contemporary documents, we shall draw up a rapid sketch of his life, reserving an ampler scale of analysis for the Phalaris controversy, and the college quarrel, as the two capital events which served to diversify a passage through this world else unusually tranquil and uniform.

Richard Bentley was born the 27th of January, 1662, at Oulton, not far from Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Between his grandson, the celebrated Mr. Cumberland, and his present biographer, there is a difference as to the standing of his parents. Cumberland labors to elevate the family to a station of rank and consideration, for which he receives the usual rebukes from Dr. Monk, who pronounces them to have belonged to the higher description of English yeomen,' and thinks it more honorable to Bentley to have raised himself from obscurity by the force of genius and merit,' than to have been born of gentle blood.' But the two cases stand in no real opposition. For a man with Bentley's object, low

birth is not otherwise an obstacle to success in England, than as the poverty, which it generally presumes, may chance to exclude him from the universities. Once there, he will find that the popular provisions of those great bodies insure the fullest benefit to any real merit he may possess; and without that, even noble blood would have failed in procuring those distinctions which Bentley obtained. Besides, for Dr. Monk's purpose, Bentley was not low enough — his friends being at any rate in a condition to send him to college. The zeal of Cumberland, therefore, we think rightly directed. And after all, with Dr. Monk's leave, since the question is not, which sort of parentage would be most creditable to Bentley, but which answers best to the facts, we must say that we incline to Cumberland's view. Finding it made out that, during the Parliament war, Bentley's family adhered to the royal cause; and that of his two grandfathers, one was a captain, and the other a major, in the cavalier army; we must think it probable that they belonged to the armigerous part of the population, and were entitled to write themselves Esquire in any bill, quittance, &c. whatsoever.' On the paternal side, however, the family was impoverished by its loyalty.

From his mother, who was much younger than his father, Bentley learned the rudiments of Latin grammar. He was afterwards sent to the grammar school of Wakefield, and, upon the death of his father, Bentley (then thirteen years old) was transferred to the care of his maternal grandfather, who resolved to send him to college. This design he soon carried into effect; and in the summer of 1676, at what would now be thought too early an age by three years at the