Richard Bentley

A bust of Bentley now stands in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge

Richard Bentley (January 27, 1662 – July 14, 1742) was an English theologian, classical scholar and critic.

Quotes

• It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.
  • Monk's Life of Bentley, p. 90.

• “Whatever is, is not,” is the maxim of the anarchist, as often as anything comes across him in the shape of a law which he happens not to like.
  • Declaration of Rights. Compare: "Whatever is, is in its causes just", John Dryden, Œdipus, Act iii. Sc. 1.

• The fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms.
  • Sermons, vii. Works, Vol. iii. p. 147 (1692). Compare: "That fortuitous concourse of atoms", "Review of Sir Robert Peel's Address", Quarterly Review, vol. liii. p. 270 (1835); "In this article a party was described as a fortuitous concourse of atoms,—a phrase supposed to have been used for the first time many years afterwards by Lord John Russell", Croker Papers, vol. ii. p. 54.

• It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.
  • Of Pope's translation of The Iliad — as quoted in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Eleven Volumes by John Hawkins, Vol. IV (1787), The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, "Life of Pope", footnote on p. 126.

Quotes about Bentley

The greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred; a man so great that in his own province he serves for a touchstone of merit and has always been admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars: Richard Bentley. ~ A. E. Housman

• By the second half of the century the percipient few in the universities had come to realize that not all was well. If...the universities were to be places of high scholarship, then the reforms of the first half of the century were found wanting, or at any rate insufficient and wrongly conceived. A different kind of change was therefore required, and there could be none, unless critical scholarship was reinstated. It was an important feature of that change that Bentley arrived back in this country together, as it were, with the great Germans who had made themselves his disciples.
  • Charles Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (1986), p. 138

• The greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred; a man so great that in his own province he serves for a touchstone of merit and has always been admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars: Richard Bentley.
  • A. E. Housman, Introductory Lecture, delivered before the faculties of arts and laws and of science in University College, London, October 3, 1892 (1937), p. 9

• Bentley had lived with the ancients till he understood them as no one will ever understand them who brings to their study a taste formed on the poetry of Elizabeth's time or ours.
  • A. E. Housman, Introductory Lecture, delivered before the faculties of arts and laws and of science in University College, London, October 3, 1892 (1937), pp. 9-10

• Lucida tela diei: these are the words that come into one's mind when one has halted at some stubborn perplexity of reading or interpretation, has witnessed Scaliger and Gronouius and Huetius fumble at it one after another, and then turns to Bentley and sees Bentley strike his finger on the place and say thou ailest here, and here. His Manilius is a greater work than either the Horace or the Phalaris; yet its subject condemns it to find few readers, and those few for the most part unfit: to be read by Dorville and left unread by Madvig. Haupt alone has praised it in proportion to its merit.
  • A. E. Housman, M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primvs (1937), pp. xvi-xvii

• Upon Aristophanes...he [Richard Porson] had employed his most brilliant efforts of emendatory criticism; and he is said to have cried with delight on meeting with a copy of this poet, with a quantity of emendations in the margin, by Bentley.
  • Henry Luard, 'Porson', in Cambridge Essays, contributed by Members of the University. 1857 (1857), p. 153

• In the last decades of his life Bentley undertook two ambitious projects that had an immense effect on the future of scholarship, namely editions of the New Testament and of Homer ... [H]e would not present once again the received text with a farrago of readings from manuscripts of all ages, but would try to restore the oldest knowable text. This was in his opinion the text of the fourth century A.D. at the time of the Council of Nicaea. He proposed to restrict himself to the oldest Greek manuscripts, supplemented by the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate, of the ancient Oriental versions, and of the earliest quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers. The edition was to become, as Bentley said, "a Charter, a Magna Carta to the whole Christian church". He collected material from manuscripts for more than twenty years, zealously assisted, among other fellow labourers, by the French Benedictines. Although personal difficulties, as well as the complexity of the problems, prevented Bentley from completing and publishing his edition, his project anticipated by a whole century the work of Lachmann and others.
  • Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (1976), p. 156

• The mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains
  Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
  • Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1743), Book IV.

• Bentley, like the anti-Miltonists, had a great gift for getting hold of the right thing—by the wrong end. Again and again he sees exactly what is happening in a passage of Milton. He then deplores it, but we need not do so, and can be grateful for his insight. He may be wrong-headed, but at least he is headed.
  • Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (1963), p. 14