Sir William Temple, in his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning. Of the epistles of the so-called Phalaris he said, "I think he must have little skill in painting, that cannot find out this to be an original." Dean Aldrich of Christ's Church, had on this account selected them for publication, committing them to the editorial care of the Hon. Robert Boyle, brother of the earl of Orrery. A MS. of the work was in the king's library, and it was thought desirable to collate it. Bentley granted the loan of it, but as the collation was tardy, he demanded it back ere the process was completed. Bennet, the publisher, under whom the collation was made, told his own story to Boyle, and he in his preface reflected sharply on Bentley. In fact, Bentley had made an experiment, and found that the collation could easily have been made in four hours, so that the work might have been done on the very day on which it was to be given back, the librarian extending the loan till "candle-light" of the 23rd of May, O.S. Bentley explained, but to no purpose. His friend Wotton had, in the meantime, published a reply to Sir W. Temple, called Reflections on Ancient and Modern learning, and to a second edition of this work in 1697, Bentley appended a diatribe, declaring the literary trashiness and spuriousness of the epistles, that went by the name of Phalaris. The Christ Church scholars buckled on their armour, and Atterbury and Smallridge published a reply. Other combatants came into the field, and Swift's Battle of the Books was one of the weapons of satire. Pope and Garth both took the same side, and the latter of them coined the disparaging antithesis,—
" So diamonds take a lustre from their foil,
'Tis to a Bentley, that we owe a Boyle."
Bentley did not immediately reply, and his silence was taken by many as proof of confessed discomfiture. But in 1699, he produced his "Dissertation on the epistles of Phalaris." This treatise not only for ever demolished his opponents, but placed his fame on an unshaken basis. He proved that the epistles were full of anachronisms, such as the borrowing of money from the city of Phintia, not built till about 300 years after the time of the Sicilian tyrant, and the adoption of sentiments from later writers; and shows that the style is not that of Sicilian Greek, but Attic, and even that form of Attic, or later Greek, which was not in existence and use till after the conquests of Alexander. The varied and deep learning of the "Dissertation," its acumen and tact, its reasoning and sarcasm, the subtlety of its criticism, and the breadth of its deductions, make it an immortal masterpiece. Its immediate purpose was of no great use; the reprobation of "a fardle of common-places" was no mighty achievement in itself, but the mode and form of proof set an example which still commands imitation, and affords an unrivalled specimen of critical investigation, either in tracing the more delicate shades of verbal usage, or in comparing the more salient features of the styles and customs of different ages and authors.
In 1696, Bentley had taken the degree of D.D. at Cambridge; in 1700 he was promoted, at the unanimous recommendation of an episcopal commission, to the mastership of Trinity college in that university. The following year he was collated archdeacon of Ely, and in January of the same year, he married Joanna, daughter of Sir John Barnard of Brampton. But the mastership soon plunged him into deep and repeated troubles. Various elements of temper and character unfitted him for such a situation, so that the period of his mastership was a perpetual broil from 1709 till 1738. He spent large sums in enlarging and beautifying the college buildings. The library and the university press were greatly benefited by his reforms, and under him too the oral examinations for scholarships and fellowships were superseded by written questions,—the plan pursued with such success to the present day. When he set his heart on any reform, he was careless of any statute that stood in his way. Nor did he ever stoop to win his way to an end by a "smooth answer" to his opponents; for he chose rather to confront them with haughty argument, and contemptuous epithet. On the 21st of December, 1709, a lawyer named Miller came to spend his Christmas at Trinity, of which college he was a fellow, and he warmly espoused the cause of the fellows, who had laid their grievances before him. For his insolence Bentley dispossessed him of his fellowship, the vice-master and some senior fellows replaced him, and Bentley again struck his name from the list. This procedure was both harsh and inopportune, and it fanned the Sparks into a blaze. The fellows complained that the master violated the statutes, and wasted the property of the college. The charge was presented to Patrick, bishop of Ely, but he did not think that he had any authority in Trinity college. It was renewed and tried before Dr. Moore, his successor. Bentley published a reply to the charges against him. "Had I," says he, "herded and sotted with them, had I suffered them to play their cheats in their several offices, I might have done what I would, I might have devoured and destroyed the college, and yet come away with their applauses for a good and a great man." But this episcopal judge died before sentence was pronounced, and his successor, Bishop Fleetwood, refused at first to interfere. The case became a question, whether the crown or the bishop of Ely had jurisdiction. The crown took to itself the prerogative, and the cause was ultimately carried before the king in council. After no little manœuvreing it came before the king's bench, and the judges declared that visitatorial power lay with the bishop over the master. There were years of litigation, and some of Bentley's personal enemies, such as Colbatch and Middleton, were heavily fined for libels. But before the issue, Bentley had, by a dexterous and somewhat unprincipled policy, secured his election as regius professor of divinity. On occasion of the king's visit to Cambridge, Bentley demanded a fee of four guineas, over and above the usual gratuity, from several persons created doctors by royal mandate. Some demurred, but paid. Dr. Conyers Middleton paid under this protest, that the regius professor should refund the money if it were found to be an illegal exaction. Dr. Middleton some time afterward obtained a decree for the arrest of the master, but the arrest, though the esquire-beadle went to the master's lodge, was not executed. A second decree was served, and the master put in bail. But he failed to attend the vice-chancellor's court, pleading a fit of gout, the beadle in the meanwhile reporting some of his words to this effect, "I will not be concluded by what the vice-chancellor and some of his friends may determine over a bottle of wine." The vice-chancellor then suspended him, but granted him some days for making a formal submission. But the intractable master allowed the prescribed period to pass, and upon the 17th of October, 1718, a grace was passed by the senate stripping Bentley of all his honours and degrees, and sinking him to the rank of an undergraduate. Bentley appealed against this sweeping decision to the king; the vice-chancellor was summoned to appear before the council, the case was fully heard, then referred to a committee, then sent to the king's bench, and after five years the judges issued a mandamus to the university, ordering it to restore Bentley to all the honours and privileges of which he had been so summarily deprived. But the great dispute was far from termination. The bishop of Ely, now Dr. Greene, resolved to act as visitor, and Bentley was summoned to appear at Ely on 1st April, 1729. In April, 1734, he was found guilty of the charges brought against him, and the bishop commanded him to be deprived of the mastership of Trinity. But the vice-master, who was ordered to execute the sentence, hesitated, and then resigned; and his successor, a creature of Bentley's own, refused, on the plea that he was not the same person on whom the episcopal order had been laid. Delays occurred, legal forms were resorted to, but the master remained secure. Bishop Greene died in 1738, and the matter dropped. Four years afterwards Bentley was seized with fever, and died in his eighty-first year, on the 14th of July, 1742. In 1709 he had failed in obtaining the bishopric of Chichester. In 1724 he refused the see of Bristol, and in 1730 the deanery of Lincoln.
But when Bentley was fighting with college accusations and episcopal censures, gaining actions at law for libel, and compromising matters with some of his antagonists on principles honouring to neither party, he was, during such a period of intrigue and distraction, busy with the works to which he owes his fame. There were published at Amsterdam in 1710 some remarks of his on the first two comedies of Aristophanes, and at Rheims were published some of his criticisms on the fragments of Menander and Philemon. His edition of Horace, the labour of ten years, appeared in 1711, and exhibits in a marked shape the excellencies and defects of its learned editor—great industry, singular ingenuity, and felicitous conjecture, along with inexcusable carelessness, and characteristic vanity and arrogance. Besides throwing a new light on the Horatian metres, he attempted to fix the chronology of the poems. His general principle was, that the coarser and more wanton of the poems belong to the bard's earlier years, but the truth of this observation cannot be fully borne out; nor can the other portion of his
