BENT'LEY, RICHARD (1662-1742). An Eng lish critic and scholar. He was horn at Oulton, in Yorkshire, January 27, 1662. In 1676 he en tered Saint John's College, Cambridge, in the humble capacity of subsizar. Little is known of his university career, except that he showed early a strong taste for the cultivation of ancient learning. At the usual time, he took the degree of bachelor of arts, and on leaving the university he was appointed head master of the grammar school of Spalding. Lincolnshire. About a year afterwards he resigned this situation to become tutor to the son of Dr. Stillingfleet, then dean of Saint Paul's, and subsequently Bishop of Wor rester. Bentley accompanied his pupil to Oxford, where he had full scope for the cultivation of classical studies; and that he succeeded in acquiring there some local reputation is evinced by his having been twice appointed to deliver the Boyle Lectures (q.v.) on the evidences of natural and revealed religion. He entered the Church. and owed to the patronage of the Bishop of Worcester various good ecclesiastical appointments, and through the same influence became librarian of the Royal Library at Saint James's. In 1690 he published his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, which established his reputation throughout Europe, and may be said to have commenced a new era in scholarship. The prin ciples of historical criticism were then little known, and their application to establish that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris,whieh professed to have been written in the Sixth Century B.C., were the forgery of a period some eight centuries later, created a considerable stir in the learned world.
In 1700 Bentley was appointed master of Trin ity College, Cambridge; and in the following year he married Sirs. Joanna Bernard, the daughter of a Huntingdonshire knight. The his tory of Bentley's mastership of Trinity is the narrative of an unbroken series of quarrels and litigations, provoked by his arrogance and rapac ity, for which, it must be confessed, he was fully as well known during his lifetime as for his learning. Ile contrived. nevertheless, to get him
self appointed regins professor of divinity, and, by his boldness and perseverance, managed to pass seathless through all his controversies. Notwithstanding that at one time the Bishop of Ely, the visitor of Trinity, pronounced sentence depriving him of his mastership, and that at another the senate of the university pronounced a similar sentence depriving him of his academic honors, he remained in full possession of both the former and the latter till the day of his death. This stormy life did not impair his literary activ ity. He edited various classics—among others, the works of Horace—upon which he bestowed vast labor. TTe is, however, as much celebrated for what he proposed as for what he actually per formed. The proposal to print an edition of the Creek New Testament, in which the received text should be corrected by a careful comparison with all the existing MSS., was then singularly bold, and evoked violent opposition. He failed in carrying out his proposal; but the principles of criticism which he maintained have since been triumphantly established, and have led to im portant results in other hands. He also called attention to the value of the digamma in the metrical study of Homer. He is to be regarded as the founder of that school of classical eriti •ism of which Porson afterwards exhibited the chief excellences, as well as the chief defects; and which, though it was itself prevented by too strict attention to minute verbal detail from ever achieving much, yet diligently collected many of the facts which men of wider views have since grouped together, to form the modern science of comparative philology. Bentley died in 1742, leaving behind him one son, Richard, who inher ited much of his father's taste, with, however. none of his energy, and several daughters, one of whom, Joanna. married. and was the mother of Richard Cumberland. the dramatist. Consult: Monk, Life of Richard Bentley (London, 1333) ; and Jebb, Bentley, English Men of Letters Series (New York, 1882).