to correct Homer may be illustrated by a single example. Priam, the aged king of Troy, is standing beside Helen on the walls, and looking forth on the plain where warriors are moving. He sees Odysseus passing along the ranks of his followers, and asks Helen who that is. 'His arms lie on the earth that feedeth many but he himself, like a leader of the flock (Kтídos &s), moves along the ranks of men; yea, I liken him to a young ram with thick fleece, that passeth through a great flock of white sheep.' Bentley, thinking that s must be Fos, had to get rid of Kríλos somehow. 'Never yet,' says Bentley, 'have I seen a ram ordering the ranks of men. And what tautology! He moves along, like a ram: and I compare him to a ram!' And so he changes the ram into a word meaning 'unarmed' (writing avràp vidos ewr instead of αὐτὸς δὲ κτίλος ὥς), because the arms of Odysseus are said to be lying on the ground.

Bentley had done first-rate work on some authors who would have rewarded him better than Homer,-better than Horace or Manilius. It was his habit to enter collations of manuscripts, or his own conjectures, in the margins of his classical books. Some of these books are at Cambridge. Many more are in the British Museum. The Gentleman's Magazine for 1807 relates how Kidd found 60 volumes, formerly Bentley's, at the London bookseller Lackington's, to whom they had been sold by Cumberland, and from whom they were at once bought for the Museum by the Trustees. The complete list of the Bentley books in the British Museum

ad exprimendam Hastae celeritatem, non magis quam Molossus pes trium longarum ad tarditatem exprimendam. Quid si legat quis, Atampò pèv, pede Proceleusmatico, ut capitibu' nutantes pinus,' Parietibus textum caecis iter.'

comprises (omitting duplicates) 70 works. All, or nearly all, the manuscript notes which enrich these volumes have now been printed somewhere. The notes on Lucan, whom Bentley had intended to edit, were published by Cumberland in 1760. Among the most ingenious emendations are those on Nicander, the Greek physician of Colophon (circ. 150 B. C.), whose epic on venomous bites (Theriaca) Bentley had annotated at the request of Dr Mead. But the province of Greek and Roman literature in which these remains most strikingly illustrate Bentley's power is, on the whole, that of the comic drama.

He had sent Küster his remarks on two plays of Aristophanes, the Plutus and Clouds. All the eleven comedies have his marginal notes in his copy of Froben's edition, now in the British Museum. These notes were first published by G. Burges in the Classical Journal XI-XIV. For exact scholarship, knowledge, and brilliant felicity, they are wonderfully in advance of anything which had then been done for the poet. Porson is said to have felt the joy of a truly great scholar on finding that his own emendations of Aristophanes had been anticipated, in some seventy instances, by the predecessor whom he so highly revered. Bentley's emendations of Plautus are also very remarkable. They have been published, for the first time, by Mr E. A. Sonnenschein, in his edition of the Captivi (1880), from the Plautus in the British Museum which Bentley used; it is the second edition of Pareus (Frankfurt, 1623). All our twenty comedies have been touched more or less, the number of Bentley's conjectures in each ranging from perhaps 20 to 150 or more.

As in Aristophanes, so in Plautus, Bentley sometimes

anticipated the best thoughts of later critics. Such coincidences show how much he was in advance of his age. Those conjectures of Bentley's which were afterwards made independently by such men as Porson or Ritschl were in most cases certain; in Bentley's day, however, they were as yet beyond the reach of everyone else. Nor must we overlook his work on Lucretius. That library of Isaac Voss which Bentley had vainly sought to secure for Oxford carried with it to Leyden the two most important MSS. of Lucretius,-one of the 9th century (Munro's A), another of the 10th (B). Bentley had to work without these. His notes,-first completely published in the Glasgow edition of Wakefield (1813),fill only 22 octavo pages in the Oxford edition of 1818. But their quality has been recognised by the highest authority. Munro thinks that Bentley, if he had had the Leyden MSS., 'might have anticipated what Lachmann did by a century and a half.' Another labour also, in another field, descended from Bentley to Lachmann: of that we must now speak.

CHAPTER X.

THE PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

DR JOHN MILL published in 1707 his edition of the Greek Testament, giving in foot-notes the various readings which he had collected by the labour of thirty years. To understand the impression which this work produced, it is necessary to recall the nature of its predecessors. The Greek text of the New Testament, as then generally read, was ultimately based on two sixteenth century editions; that of Erasmus (Basel, 1516), which had been marked by much carelessness; and that due chiefly to Stunica, in the Complutensian' Polyglott (so called from Complutum, or Alcalá de Henares) of Cardinal Ximenes, printed in 1514, and probably published in 1522. The folio edition printed by Robert Estienne at Paris in 1550 was founded on the text of Erasmus. The Elzevir editions, of which the first appeared in 1624, gave the text of Estienne as imperfectly revised by the reformer Beza. The second Elzevir edition (1633) declared this to be the text now received by all.' Hence it came to be known as the 'Received Text.'

The existence of various readings, though a wellknown, was hardly a prominent fact. Some had been

given in the margin of the folio Estienne; Beza had referred to others; more had been noticed by Walton in the Greek Testament of his Polyglott (1657), and by Bishop Fell in his small edition (1675). The sources of textual evidence generally had been described and discussed with intelligence and candour by the French scholar Simon (1689-95). But Mill's edition was the first which impressed the public mind by marshalling a great array of variants, roughly estimated at thirty thousand. In his learned Prolegomena Mill often expressed opinions and preferences, but without supplying any general clue to the labyrinth exhibited in his critical

notes.

The alarm felt in some quarters is strikingly shown by Whitby's censure of Mill's edition (1710), in which he goes so far as to affirm that the 'Received Text' can be defended in all places where the sense is affected (in iis omnibus locis lectionem textus defendi posse), and that even in matters of lesser moment' it is 'most rarely' invalidated. On the other hand, anti-Christian writers did not fail to make capital of a circumstance which they represented as impugning the tradition. Thus Anthony Collins, in his Discourse of Free-Thinking,' specially dwelt on Mill's 30,000 variants. In his published reply to Collins (1713), Bentley pointed out that such variants are perfectly compatible with the absence of any essential corruption, while he insisted on the value of critical studies in their application to the Scriptures. Dr Hare, in publicly thanking Bentley for this reply, urged him to undertake an edition of the New Testament. Undoubtedly there was a wide-spread feeling that some systematic effort should be made towards disengaging a standard text from the variations set forth by Mill.