TITLE-PAGE OF BENTLEY'S EDITION OF HORACE, 1711
Especially characteristic of the atmosphere in which Bentley lived and worked is "the important affair of the dedication." Having discovered that the Earl of Oxford was "anxious that the world should know, that his ancestors were related to the Veres and Mortimers of former centuries, and that his family estate in Herefordshire had been in possession of the Harleys since the reign of Edward the First," Bentley took particular pains that these glories should be "fully and accurately displayed." "Good taste" comments Monk "had not yet abolished the fashion, which demanded from every dedicator, whether classical or vernacular, the most unsparing praise that language could supply."
Bentley's edition of Terence (1726) was designed, characteristically, to supplant and extinguish that of Francis Hare, Dean of Worcester. The text was corrected "in not less than a thousand places" and in every line the first accented syllable of every dipodia was marked with an acute accent—"a laborious task, which must have vastly increased the trouble of correcting the press." Included in the first half of the volume were a Schediasma or dissertation upon the metres of Terence and Bentley's Commencement Oration of 1725, on the occasion of the creation of seven Doctors of Divinity. The second half of the book consisted of an edition of Phaedrus and Publius Syrus, the Phaedrus being undertaken to anticipate an edition projected by Hare containing emendations "of the most daring class."
A Sermon upon Popery, preached by Bentley before the university on 5 November, 1715, and printed in the same year, is of interest not only as an expression of the vigorous No-Popery spirit of 1715, but as supplying material and phraseology for the sermon recited by Corporal Trim in the second book of Tristram Shandy.
It was Bentley, too, who arranged for the publication of a second edition of Newton's Principia in 1713. "The first impression being entirely exhausted," says Monk, "the lovers of philosophy were, in a manner, debarred access to the fountain of truth" and Bentley engaged Roger Cotes to supervise the new edition.
Into the history of Bentley's many controversies it is fortunately unnecessary to enter, but one of his pamphlets, which brought the university printer into the Vice-Chancellor's court on a charge of libel, must be mentioned.
In 1721 there appeared a pamphlet, written by Conyers Middleton, but published anonymously in London, entitled Remarks, Paragraph by Paragraph, upon the Proposals lately publish'd by Richard Bentley, for a New Edition of the Greek Testament and Latin Version, and full of "sheer personal malice." Bentley's proposals were described as "low and paltry higgling to squeeze our money from us," reminiscent of "those mendicants in the streets, who beg our charity with an half sheet of proposals pinned upon their breasts."
Bentley's reply was prompt and vigorous; he chose to assume that the author of the pamphlet was Dr John Colbatch, the Casuistical Professor[83], and answered him in what Monk describes as the vocabulary of Billingsgate. "Cabbage-head," "Maggot," "Gnawing-rat," "Mountebank" were some of the terms used. "He never," wrote Bentley, "broaches a piece of mere knavery, without a preface about his conscience; nor ever offers to us downright nonsense, without eyes, muscles, and shoulders wrought up into the most solemn posture of gravity."