Richard Bentley - Legacy and Honours

Legacy and Honours

• Bentley left about £5000 in his estate (which would have the buying power of nearly £500,000 in 2010).
• He bequeathed a few Greek manuscripts, brought from Mount Athos, to the Trinity College library.
• He bequeathed his books and papers to his nephew Richard Bentley, a fellow of Trinity. At his own death in 1786, the younger Bentley left the papers to the Trinity College library.
• The British Museum eventually purchased the books, which in many cases had valuable manuscript notes, and holds them in its collection.

Bentley was the first Englishman to be ranked with the great heroes of classical learning. Before him there were only John Selden, and, in a more restricted field, Thomas Gataker and Pearson. "Bentley inaugurated a new era of the art of criticism. He opened a new path. With him criticism attained its majority. Where scholars had hitherto offered suggestions and conjectures, Bentley, with unlimited control over the whole material of learning, gave decisions".

The modern German school of philology recognised his genius. Bunsen wrote that Bentley "was the founder of historical philology." Jakob Bernays says of his corrections of the Tristia, "corruptions which had hitherto defied every attempt even of the mightiest, were removed by a touch of the fingers of this British Samson."

Bentley was credited with creating the English school of Hellenists, by which the 18th century was distinguished, including scholars such as R Dawes, J Markland, John Taylor, Jonathan Toup, T Tyrwhitt, Richard Porson, Peter Paul Dobree, Thomas Kidd and James Henry Monk. Although the Dutch school of the period had its own tradition, it was also influenced by Bentley. His letters to Tiberius Hemsterhuis on his edition of Julius Pollux made the latter one of Bentley's most devoted admirers.

Bentley inspired a following generation of scholars. Self-taught, he created his own discipline; but no contemporary English guild of learning could measure his power or check his eccentricities. He defeated his academic adversaries in the Phalaris controversy. The attacks by Alexander Pope (he was assigned a niche in The Dunciad), John Arbuthnot and others demonstrated their inability to appreciate his work, as they considered textual criticism as pedantry. His classical controversies also called forth Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books.

In a university where the instruction of youth or the religious controversy of the day was the chief occupation, Bentley was unique. His learning and original views seem to have been developed before 1700. After this period, he acquired little and made only spasmodic efforts to publish. But the critic A.E. Housman believed that the edition of Manilius (1739) was Bentley's greatest work.