(L. V.*)
BENTIVOGLIO, GUIDO (1579-1644), Italian cardinal, statesman and historian, was born at Ferrara in 1579. After studying at Padua, he went to reside at Rome, and was received with great favour by Pope Clement VIII., who made him his private chamberlain. The next pope, Paul V., created him archbishop of Rhodes in 1607, and appointed him as nuncio to Flanders and afterwards to France; on his return to Rome in 1621 he was created cardinal and entrusted by Louis XIII. with the management of French affairs at the papal court. He became the intimate friend of Pope Urban VIII., who appointed him to the suburban see of Palestrina in 1691. An able writer and skilful diplomatist, Bentivoglio was marked out as Urban’s successor, but he died suddenly on the 7th of September 1644 at the opening of the conclave. Bentivoglio’s principal works are:—Della Guerra di Fiandria (best edition, Cologne, 1633-1639), translated into English by Henry, earl of Monmouth (London, 1654); Relazioni di G. Bentivoglio in tempo delle sue Nunziature di Fiandria e di Francia (Cologne, 1630); Lettere diplomatiche di Guido Bentivoglio (Brussels, 1631, frequently reprinted, best edition by L. Scarabelli, 2 vols., Turin, 1852). The complete edition of his works was published at Venice in 1668 in 4to. A selection of his letters has been adopted as a classic in the Italian schools.
BENTLEY, RICHARD (1662-1742), English scholar and critic, was born at Oulton near Wakefield, Yorkshire, on the 27th of January 1662. His grandfather had suffered in person and estate in the royalist cause, and the family were in consequence in reduced circumstances. Bentley’s mother, the daughter of a stonemason in Oulton, was a woman of excellent understanding and some education, as she was able to give her son his first lessons in Latin. From the grammar school of Wakefield Richard Bentley passed to St John’s College, Cambridge, being admitted subsizar in 1676. He afterwards obtained a scholarship and took the degree of B.A. in 1680 (M.A. 1683). He never succeeded to a fellowship, being appointed by his college, before he was twenty-one, headmaster of Spalding grammar school. In this post he did not remain long, being selected by Dr Edward Stillingfleet, dean of St Paul’s, to be domestic tutor to his son. This appointment introduced Bentley at once to the society of the most eminent men of the day, threw open to him the best private library in England, and brought him into familiar intercourse with Dean Stillingfleet, a man of sound understanding, who had not shrunk from exploring some of the more solid and abstruse parts of ancient learning. The six years which he passed in Stillingfleet’s family were employed, with the restless energy characteristic of the man, in exhausting the remains of the Greek and Latin writers, and laying up those stores of knowledge upon which he afterwards drew as circumstances required.
In 1689 Stillingfleet became bishop of Worcester, and Bentley’s pupil went to reside at Oxford in Wadham College, accompanied by his tutor. Bentley’s introductions and his own merits placed him at once on a footing of intimacy with the most distinguished scholars in the university, Dr John Mill, Humphrey Hody, Edward Bernard. Here he revelled in the MS. treasures of the Bodleian, Corpus and other college libraries. He projected and occupied himself with collections for vast literary schemes. Among these are specially mentioned a corpus of the fragments of the Greek poets and an edition of the Greek lexicographers. But his first publication was in connexion with a writer of much inferior note. The Oxford (Sheldonian) press was about to bring out an edition (the editio princeps) from the unique MS. in the Bodleian of the Greek Chronicle (a universal history down to A.D. 560) of John of Antioch (date uncertain, between 600 and 1000), called John Malalas or “John the Rhetor”; and the editor, Dr John Mill, principal of St Edmund Hall, had requested Bentley to look through the sheets and make any remarks on the text. This originated Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, which occupies less than one hundred pages at the end of the Oxford Malalas (1691). This short tractate at once placed Bentley at the head of all living English scholars. The ease with which, by a stroke of the pen, he restores passages which had been left in hopeless corruption by the editors of the Chronicle, the certainty of the emendation and the command over the relevant material, are in a style totally different from the careful and laborious learning of Hody, Mill or E. Chilmead. To the small circle of classical students (lacking the great critical dictionaries of modern times) it was at once apparent that there had arisen in England a critic whose attainments were not to be measured by the ordinary academical standard, but whom these few pages had sufficed to place by the side of the great Grecians of a former age. Unfortunately this mastery over critical science was accompanied by a tone of self-assertion and presumptuous confidence which not only checked admiration, but was calculated to rouse enmity. Dr Monk, indeed, Bentley’s biographer, charged him (in his first edition, 1830) with an indecorum of which he was not guilty. “In one place,” writes Dr Monk, “he accosts Dr Mill as ὦ Ἰωαννιδίον (Johnny), an indecorum which neither the familiarity of friendship, nor the licence of a dead language, can justify towards the dignified head of a house.” But the object of Bentley’s apostrophe was not his correspondent Dr Mill, but his author John Malalas, whom in another place he playfully appeals to as “Syrisce.” From this publication, however, dates the origin of those mixed feelings of admiration and repugnance which Bentley throughout his career continued to excite among his contemporaries.
In 1690 Bentley had taken deacon’s orders in the Church. In 1692 he was nominated first Boyle lecturer, a nomination which was repeated in 1694. He was offered the appointment a third time in 1695 but declined it, being by that time involved in too many other undertakings. In the first series of lectures (“A Confutation of Atheism”) he endeavours to present the Newtonian physics in a popular form, and to frame them (especially in opposition to Hobbes) into a proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator. He had some correspondence with Newton, then living in Trinity College, on the subject. The second series, preached in 1694, has not been published and is believed to be lost. Andrew Kippis, the editor of the Biographia Britannica, mentions MS. copies of them as in existence. Scarcely was Bentley in priest’s orders before he was preferred to a prebendal stall in Worcester cathedral. In 1693 the keepership of the royal library becoming vacant, great efforts were made by his friends to obtain the place for Bentley, but through court interest the post was given to Mr Thynne. An arrangement, however, was made, by which the new librarian resigned in favour of Bentley, on condition that he received an annuity of £130 for life out of the salary, which only amounted to £200. To these preferments were added in 1695 a royal chaplaincy and the living of Hartlebury. In the same year Bentley was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1696 proceeded to the degree of D.D. The recognition of continental scholars came in the shape of a dedication, by Graevius, prefixed to a dissertation of Albert Rubens, De Vita Flavii Mallii Theodori, published at Utrecht in 1694.
While these distinctions were being accumulated upon Bentley, his energy was making itself felt in many and various directions. He had official apartments in St James’s Palace, and his first care was the royal library. He made great efforts to retrieve this collection from the dilapidated condition into which it had been allowed to fall. He employed the mediation of the earl of Marlborough to beg the grant of some additional rooms in the palace for the books. The rooms were granted, but Marlborough characteristically kept them for himself. Bentley enforced the law against the publishers, and thus added to the library nearly 1000 volumes which they had neglected to deliver. He was commissioned by the university of Cambridge to obtain Greek and Latin founts for their classical books, and accordingly he had cast in Holland those beautiful types which appear in the Cambridge books of that date. He assisted Evelyn in his Numismata. All Bentley’s literary appearances at this time were of this accidental character. We do not find him settling down to the steady execution of any of the great projects with which he had started. He designed, indeed, in 1694 an edition of Philostratus, but readily abandoned it to G. Olearius, (Öhlschläger), “to the joy,” says F.A. Wolf, “of Olearius and of no one else.” He supplied Graevius with collations of Cicero, and Joshua Barnes with a warning as to the spuriousness of the Epistles of Euripides, which was thrown away upon that blunderer, who printed the epistles and declared that no one could doubt their genuineness but a man perfrictae frontis aut judicii imminuti. Bentley supplied to Graevius’s Callimachus a masterly collection of the fragments with notes, published at Utrecht in 1697.
The Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, the work on which Bentley’s fame in great part rests, originated in the same casual way. William Wotton, being about to bring out in 1697 a second edition of his book on Ancient and Modern Learning, claimed of Bentley the fulfilment of an old promise to write a paper exposing the spuriousness of the Epistles of Phalaris. This paper was resented as an insult by the Christ Church editor of Phalaris, Charles Boyle, afterwards earl of Orrery, who in getting the MS. in the royal library collated for his edition (1695) had had a little quarrel with Bentley. Assisted by his college friends, particularly Atterbury, Boyle wrote a reply, “a tissue,” says Dr Alexander Dyce (in his edition of Bentley’s Works, 1836-1838), “of superficial learning, ingenious sophistry, dexterous malice and happy raillery.” The reply was hailed by the public as crushing and went immediately into a second edition. It was incumbent on Bentley to rejoin. This he did (1699) in what Porson styles “that immortal dissertation,” to which no answer was or could be given, although the truth of its conclusions was not immediately recognized. (See [Phalaris].)