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just what he wishes to believe. How he could believe it, is another question. If he had consulted the Life of Milton by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips (1694), he would have found some adverse testimony. Paradise Lost was originally written down in small groups of some ten to thirty verses by any hand that happened to be near Milton at the time. But, when it was complete, Phillips helped his uncle in carefully revising it, with minute attention to those matters of spelling and pointing in which the amanuensis might have failed. The first edition (1667), so far from being 'miserably deformed by the press,' was remarkably accurate. As Mr Masson says, 'very great care must have been bestowed on the revising of the proofs, either by Milton himself, or by some competent person who had undertaken to see the book through the press for him. It seems likely that Milton himself caused page after page to be read over slowly to him, and occasionally even the words to be spelt out.' Bentley insists that the changes in the second edition of 1674 were due to the editor. Phillips says of this second edition :-'amended, enlarg'd, and differently dispos'd as to the number of books' [XII. instead of X., books VII. and x. being now divided] 'by his own hand, that is by his own appointment.' But the habit of mind which Bentley had formed by free conjectural criticism was such as to pass lightly over any such difficulties, even if he had clearly realised them. He felt confident in his own power of improving Milton's text; and he was eager to exercise it. The fact of Milton's blindness suggested a view of the text which he adopted; not, assuredly, without believing it; but with a belief rendered more easy by his wish.

Bentley's Paradise Lost raises an obvious question.

We know that his emendations of Milton are nearly all bad. The general style of argument which he applies to Milton is the same which he applies to the classical authors. Are his emendations of these also bad? I should answer: Many of his critical emendations, especially Latin, are bad: but many of them are good in a way and in a degree for which Paradise Lost afforded no scope. It is a rule applicable to most of Bentley's corrections, that their merit varies inversely with the "soundness of the text. Where the text seemed altogether hopeless, he was at his best; where it was corrupted, but not deeply, he was usually good, though often not convincing; where it was true, yet difficult, through some trick (faulty in itself, perhaps) of individual thought or style, he was apt to meddle overmuch. It was his forte to make rough places smooth; his foible, to make smooth places rough. If Paradise Lost had come to Bentley as a manuscript largely defaced by grave blunders and deeply-seated corruptions, his restoration of it would probably have deserved applause. The fact that his edition was regarded as a proof of dotage, shows how erroneously his contemporaries had conceived the qualities of his previous work. Bentley's mind was logical, positive, acute; wonderfully acute, where intellectual problems were not complicated with moral sympathies. Sending flashes of piercing insight over a wide and then dim field, he made discoveries; among other things, he found probable or certain answers to many verbal riddles. His 'faculty of divination' was to himself a special source of joy and pride: nor unnaturally, when we recall its most brilliant feats. But verbal emendation was only one phase of his work: and, just because it was with him a mental indulgence, almost a passion, we must guard against assuming that the

average success with which he applied it is the chief criterion of his power.

The faults of Bentley's Paradise Lost are, in kind, the faults of his Horace, but are more evident to an English reader, and are worse in degree, since the English text, unlike the Latin, affords no real ground for suspicion. The intellectual acuteness which marks the Horace is present also in the notes on Paradise Lost, but seldom wins admiration, more often appears ridiculous, because the English reader can usually see that it is grotesquely misplaced. A great and characteristic merit of Bentley's classical work, its instructiveness to students of a foreign language and literature, is necessarily absent here. And the book was got ready for the press with extreme haste. Still, the editor of Paradise Lost is not the Horatian editor gone mad. He is merely the Horatian editor showing increased rashness in a still more unfavourable field, where failure was at once SO gratuitous and so conspicuous as to look like self-caricature, while there was no proper scope for the distinctive qualities of his genius. As to poetical taste, we may at least make some allowance for the standards of the 'correct' period; let us think of Johnson's remarks on Milton's versification, and remember that some of Bentley's improvements on Milton were privately admired by Pope.

CHAPTER XII.

DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS.

AT the age of thirty-eight, when explaining his delay to answer Charles Boyle, Bentley spoke of his own ‘natural aversion to all quarrels and broils.' This has often, perhaps, been read with a smile by those who thought of his later feuds. I believe that it was quite true. Bentley was a born student. He was not, by innate impulse, a writer, still less an aspirant to prizes of the kind for which men chiefly wrangle. But his self-confidence had been exalted by the number of instances in which he had been able to explode fallacies, or to detect errors which had escaped the greatest of previous scholars. He became a dogmatic believer in the truth of his own instinctive perceptions. At last, opposition to his decrees struck him as a proof of deficient capacity, or else of moral obliquity. This habit of mind insensibly extended itself from verbal criticism into other fields of judgment. He grew less and less fit to deal with men on a basis of equal rights, because he too often carried into official or social intercourse the temper formed in his library by intellectual despotism over the blunders of the absent or the dead. He was rather too apt to treat those who dif

fered from him as if they were various readings that had cropped up from 'scrub manuscripts,' or ' scoundrel copies,' as he has it in his reply to Middleton. He liked to efface such persons as he would expunge false concords, or to correct them as he would remedy flagrant instances of hiatus. This was what made him so specially unfit for the peaceable administration of a College. It was hard for him to be primus inter pares, first among peers, but harder still to be primus intra parietes, to live within the same walls with those peers. The frequent personal association which the circumstances of his office involved was precisely calculated to show him constantly on his worst side. He would probably have made a better bishop, -though not, perhaps, a very good one, just because his contact would have been less close and continual with those over whom he was placed. Bentley had many of the qualities of a beneficent ruler, but hardly of a constitutional ruler. If he had been the sole heir of Peisistratus, he would have bestowed the best gifts of paternal government on those Athenian blacksmiths to whom he compared Joshua Barnes, and no swords would have been wreathed with myrtle in honour of a tyrannicide.

This warm-hearted, imperious man, with affections the stronger because they were not diffuse, was seen to the greatest advantage in family life, either because his monarchy was undisputed, or because, there, he could reign without governing. His happy marriage brought him four children, Elizabeth and Joanna,-a son, William, who died in earliest infancy, and Richard, the youngest, born in 1708, who grew to be an accomplished but eccentric and rather aimless man; enough of a dilettante to win the good graces of Horace Walpole, and too little of a dependent to keep them.

J. B.

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