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brought himself within the meaning of the fortieth Elizabethan Statute, and deserved the penalty of deprivation? Certainly he had. It was so found on two distinct occasions, twenty years apart, after a prolonged investigation by lawyers. Morally, the first question is: Was Bentley obliged to break the Statutes in order to keep some higher law? He certainly was not. It cannot be shown that the Statutes were in conflict with any project which he entertained for the good of the College; and, if they had been so, the proper course for him was not to violate them, but to move constitutionally for their alteration.

A further

moral question concerns the nature of his personal conduct towards the Fellows. This conduct might conceivably have been so disinterested and considerate as to give him some equitable claim on their forbearance, though they might feel bound to resist the course which he pursued. His conduct was, in fact, of an opposite character. On a broad view of the whole matter, from 1710 to 1738, the result is this. Legally, the College had been right, and Bentley wrong. Morally, there had been faults on both parts; but it was Bentley's intolerable behaviour which first, and after long forbearance, forced the Fellows into an active defence of the common interests. The words 'Farewell peace to Trinity College' were pronounced by Bentley. It is not a relevant plea that his academic ideal was higher than that of the men whose rights he attacked.

The College necessarily suffered for a time from these long years of domestic strife which had become a public scandal. Almost any other society, perhaps, would have been permanently injured. But Trinity College had the strength of unique traditions, deeply

rooted in the history of the country; and the excellent spirit shown by its best men, in the time which immediately followed Bentley's, soon dispelled the cloud. When the grave had closed over those feuds, the good which Bentley had done lived in better tests of merit, and in the traditional association of the College with the encouragement of rising sciences.

Now we must turn to an altogether different side which, throughout these stormy years, is presented by the activity of this extraordinary man.

CHAPTER VIII.

LITERARY WORK AFTER 1700.-HORACE.

FROM the beginning of 1700 to the summer of 1702 Bentley was constantly occupied with University or College affairs. On August 2, 1702, he writes to

Graevius at Utrecht: You must know that for the last two years I have hardly had two days free for literature.' This was perhaps the longest decisive interruption of literary work in his whole life. Nearly all his subsequent writings were finished in haste, and many of them were so timed as to appear at moments when he had a special reason for wishing to enlist sympathy. But his studies, as distinguished from his acts of composition, appear to have been seldom broken off for more than short spaces, even when he was most harassed by external troubles. His wonderful nerve and will enabled him to concentrate his spare hours on his own reading, at times when other men would have been able to think of nothing but threatened ruin.

His early years at Trinity College offer several instances of his generous readiness to help and encourage other scholars. One of these was Ludolph Küster, a young Westphalian then living at Cambridge, whom Bentley assisted with an edition of the Greek lexico

grapher Suidas, and afterwards with an edition of Aristophanes. Another was a young Dutchman, destined to celebrity,-Tiberius Hemsterhuys. Bentley had sent him a kindly criticism on an edition of Julius Pollux, pointing out certain defects of metrical knowledge. The effect on Hemsterhuys has been described by his famous pupil, David Ruhnken. At first he was plunged in despair: then he roused himself to intense effort. To his dying day he revered Bentley, and would hear nothing against him. The story recalls that of F. Jacobs, the editor of the Greek Anthology, who was spurred into closer study of metre by the censures of Godfrey Hermann. In 1709 John Davies, Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, published an edition of Cicero's 'Tusculan Disputations,' with an appendix of critical notes by Bentley. The notes were disparaged in a review called the Bibliothèque Choisie by the Swiss John Le Clerc, then leader of the Arminians in Holland; a versatile but shallow man, who had touched the surface of philosophy, and was now ambitious of figuring on the surface of classical literature. Some months later Le Clerc edited the fragments of the Greek comic poets, Menander and Philemon. Nettled by the review, Bentley wrote his own emendations on 323 of these fragments. He restored them metrically, showing that Le Clerc had mixed them with words from the prose texts in which they occur, and had then cut the compound into lengths of twelve syllables, regardless of scansion. Bentley's manuscript, under the name of 'Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,' was transmitted to a scholar at Utrecht, Peter Burmann, who willingly, used the permission to publish it. The first edition was sold in three weeks. Le Clerc learned who 'Phileleutherus' was, and wrote a violent letter to