Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/317

 of his heart could not long be veiled from observation, for his feelings and affections were at once too impulsive to be long repressed, and he too careless of concealment to attempt at qualifying them.' Richard Cumberland, whose words these are, had often spent his school holidays at Trinity Lodge, and he attests his grandfather Bentley's unwearied good nature to himself and his little sister. 'I have broken in upon him many a time in his hours of study, when he would put his book aside, ring his hand-bell for his servant, and be led to his shelves to take down a picture-book for my amusement. I do not say that his good-nature always gained its object, as the pictures which his books generally supplied me with were anatomical drawings of dissected bodies but he had nothing better to produce.' Once, and once only, Bentley reproved the boy 'for making a most outrageous noise' in the room over his library 'by playing at battledore and shuttlecock with Master Gooch, the bishop of Ely's son.' (The bishop, when vice-chancellor of Cambridge, had suspended Bentley's degrees.) 'And I have been at this sport, with his father,' he replied, 'but thine has been the more amusing game, so there's no harm done.' Bentley seems never to have cared for general society. At Cambridge, as formerly in London, his intercourse was chiefly with a small circle of friends, which latterly included the well-known scholars, Jeremiah Markland and John Taylor. We hear that, at the age of seventy, Bentley acquired the habit of smoking, and that he expressed his opinion of claret by saying that 'it would be port if it could.' Pope's allusion,

His hat, which never vail'd to human pride, Walker with rev'rence took, and laid aside,

refers to a certain broad-brimmed hat which Cumberland remembered hanging on a peg at the back of Bentley's armchair—he sometimes wore it in his study to shade his eyes—and to a story about it, viz. that Bentley, being greatly irritated by a visitor, on an occasion when Dr. Richard Walker was present, exclaimed, 'Walker, my hat!' and left the room. The 'rev'rence' ascribed to Walker glances, of course, at his part in the affair of the mastership, when, being vice-master, he refused to deprive Bentley. Besides this well-known passage in the fourth book of the 'Dunciad' (published in 1742, some four months before Bentley's death), other attacks had been made on Bentley by Pope, viz., in the first edition of the 'Dunciad' (1728, where 'Bentley' was afterwards changed to 'Welsted'), in the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' (1735), and in the epistle modelled on that of Horace to Augustus (1787). 'I talked against his "Homer," and the portentous cub never forgives'—that was Bentley's explanation of Pope's enmity, and beyond it all is conjecture. Warburton, too, was a persistent detractor from Bentley's merit. Envious disparagement of scholars by superficial writers on scholarly subjects was as natural then as it is now, and should be regarded as a form of reluctant homage.

'To the last hour of his life,' his grandson tells us, Bentley 'possessed his faculties firm and in their fullest vigour.' According to Markland, Bentley compared himself to 'an old trunk, which if you let it alone will last a long time; but if you jumble it by moving, will soon fall to pieces.' In 1739 he had a slight paralytic stroke, and thenceforth could not move easily without help, but that was the most serious result. In June 1742 he was able to examine for the Craven Scholarships, and helped to award one of them to Christopher Smart. Soon afterwards he was seized with pleuritic fever. On 14 July 1742 he died; the eightieth year of his life had been completed in the preceding January. He was buried in the chapel of Trinity College. A small square stone in the pavement, on the north side of the communion table, bears the words: 'H. S. E. Richardus Bentley, S.T.P.R. Obiit xiv. Jul. 1742. Ætatis 80.'

From 1700, when he took office at Trinity, down to 1738, Bentley's repose was seldom untroubled. He has himself spoken of 'official duties and harassing cares' as 'daily surging' around him. Yet his studies, it would seem, were rarely broken off. In 1709 his critical notes on the Tusculan Disputations appeared in the edition of 'John Davies.' In 1710 he wrote his emendations on Menander and Philemon. His 'Horace' was published at the end of 1711, a book in which we can feel what he says of it, that it was thrown off 'in the first impetus and glow' of his thoughts—rash and tasteless in many of its conjectures, marvellously acute in some others; on the whole, a signal proof of his learning, his ingenuity, and his argumentative power. Two years later (1713) his 'Remarks on a late Discourse of Free-thinking' (in reply to Anthony Collins) are noteworthy for a passage on the Homeric poems, endorsing the old tradition that they were first put together, from scattered lays, in the age of Pisistratus. Bentley cannot properly be regarded, however, as having anticipated F. A. Wolf's theory. Bentley meditated an edition of Homer, but left only manuscript notes on 'Iliad,' i.-vii. 54, with some slighter marginalia on the 'Iliad,' 'Odyssey,' and