BOOKS.

PROFESSOR JEBB'S " BENTLEY."*

• PROFESSOR JEBB'S volume on Bentley, which has just been added to Mr. Morley's series, presents a considerable mass of knowledge and criticism, in a form at once concentrated and attractive. The nature of the case, indeed, did not admit of any very large divergence from the story of Bentley's life, as told by Monk, whose scholarly work Mr. Jebb has necessarily placed in the forefront of his authorities. But Mr. Jebb's monograph is anything but a mere compilation. There is • EnotiA Men of Letters: Bentley. By Professor R. C. Jebb. London: Macmillan and Co.

evidence on every page of independent study, and what is more important, of the independent judgment which can only ori- ginate in a mind already stored with cognate matter, and which can never be completely simulated by the artifices of sciolism.

The only point of any importance on which we should be in- clined to take a view somewhat differing from Professor Jebb's, is the general question of the amount of sympathy and respect to be accorded to Bentley as a man. It seems to ns that his present biographer, though not concealing or denying- his hero's faults, has kept them so considerately in the back- ground, while skilfully bringing out all that can be said in his favour, that the resulting picture is a more favourable one- than Bentley's contemporaries would have recognised as correct. We shall not go into the long and distasteful story of Bentley's• quarrels with the Fellows of Trinity. But we think that ill this biography those quarrels are too leniently judged. "He had a strong conviction," says Mr. Jebb, "of the dignity of his. station, and a frank conviction that the college ought to honour itself by seeing that his surroundings were appropriate ; and he had also a Yorkshireman's share of the British dislike of being cheated." It may be just possible to excuse Bentley in this. fashion for such acts as building himself a new staircase is Trinity Lodge without the assent of the Fellows, and then coercing them, by tyrannical threats, into paying for it. But. when we find him —Mr. Jebb does not mention this—boarding private pupils in the Lodge, supplying their board, for which, they paid him, by seizing an increased amount of food and drink from the college butteries, for which he did not pay, we- feel that, in this Yorkshireman's case, the constitutional dislike of being cheated is complicated with a constitutional liking for cheating his neighbours. And our view of him as a high- handed reformer is chilled by constantly recurring anecdotes such as that of his electing Joseph Lindsay, a notorious ruffian, as a beadsman of Trinity, to oblige some neighbouring squire, for whose election-colours Lindsay had used his voice and fists_ Theelection in this case properly rested with the Senior Fellows,. as a body ; but when Bentley found, says Dr. Monk, "that neither his jokes nor his arguments availed, he declared that he- would elect this man with the single vote of Mr. Brabourn, an unfortunate personage of impaired intellects, who had now- become his never-failing supporter."

The moral which we should draw from Bentley's mingled story is not, we think, one to which Professor Jebb would object. It is that while nothing is more humanising than a study of the Classical anthOrs which dwells upon them with loving enthusi- asm, as the treasury of lofty conceptions and the example of graceful urbanity, so, on the other hand, nothing is less human,. ising than such a study of those ancient texts as aims only or principally at, self-glorification, at the acquirement of personal reputation by conjectural readings and bitter polemic. It may be allowed to illustrate our meaning by a comparison of two scholars who have recently laboured in the same field, one of whom is dead ; while of the other, a foreigner, personally quite- unknown to us, we speak only on the evidence of his pub- lished. works. The late Professor Conington, of Oxford, was a man whom no one could know without perceiving that he had been refined through and through by constant, loving immersion. in the masterpieces of antiquity. To him, every graceful or magnificent passage of £schylus, Horace, Virgil, was a real. possession,—a permanent addition to his mental equipment, an added outlet of vision on the world of ideal beauty. And the aim of his life was primarily to realise to himself with vividness these sources of his truest being, and after that to diffuse that "fountain-light of all his day" as widely as might be possible• among kindred and sympathetic souls. No one who had any acquaintance with Professor Conington will think this descrip- tion exaggerated, or will doubt that whatever may be the general merits or demerits of a classical education, there are some cases at least in which it affords an elevating stimulus such as nothing- else could impart. As an example of the contrary effect which. such studies may exert, we must mention the name of Pro- fessor Ribbeck. In such a work as Ribbeck's edition of Virgil, the editor's aim is simple and obvious. What he wants, is to be "epoch-making,"—to produce a text as different as possible from the texts approved by editors befere him. And in the pursuit of this aim, the author, on whose work the critic is engaged, gradually loses all independent vitality in his vivi- sector's eyes, and becomes a mere corpus brutum for showy experiments. Stultified by his own vanity, the commentator• loses all hold on either poetry or sense, and sinks into puerilitiea

which no ignorance could excuse, and which have no ignorance to excuse them.

We regret to say that a very large part of Bentley's work falls under this latter category. The great mass of his emenda- tions of Horace, for instance, are as bad as bad can be. They are wanton, insolent divergencies from a consistent and well-attested text. No man can really have persuaded himself

that Horace wrote thus. The man who indited these monstrous passages must have felt, in the depths of his heart, that if Horace did not write them, he would.

We will justify the tone of these last remarks by a celebrated example of Bentley's emendatory style, which will be readily intelligible to the English reader. Mr. Jebb has quoted it,— :and it may be said that a true idea of Bentley can hardly be

formed without it. Paradise Lost ends with two well-known dines :— " They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

Bentley "holds that these two lines have been gravely cor- rupted" by the imaginary " editor " of Milton's epic, who is his :stalking-horse, when he wishes to make some totally unwar- ranted alteration in the text :-

" Milton," he says, "tells us before that Adam, upon hearing Michael's predictions, was even surcharged with joy and Eve herself was not sad, but full of consolation. Why, then, does this distich dismiss our First Parents in anguish, and the reader in melancholy ? And how can the expression be justified, with wand'ring steps and slow ?' Why wand'ring, erratic steps ? Very improper, when in the line before they were guided by Providence. And why slow, when even Eve professed her readiness and alacrity for the journey ? But now lead on ; in sue is no delay r And why 'their solitary way ?' All words to represent a sorrowful parting, when even their former walks in Paradise were as solitary as their way now, there being nobody besides them two, both here and there. Shall I, therefore, after so many prior presumptions, presume at last to offer a distich, as close as may be to the author's words, and entirely -agreeable to his scheme :- Then, band in band, with social steps, their way Through Eden took, wills heavenly comfort chimed."

It is a pity that Bentley could not still further remodel the end of Paradise Lost on the analogy of his own "Mastership of Trinity, Lost and Retained." A Bentleian Adam might plausibly have argued that he could be expelled from Paradise only " per -enndem Diabolum," by the agency of the same Fiend whose function it was to bring about all the woes of man. And a sly

"understanding with the Serpent might have enabled him to cul- tivate Eden till a ripe old age, in the enjoyment of his place, if not of his honours.

Our space draws to end. But to avoid giving a one-sided impression, we will quote a passage, in which Professor Jebb has summed up, in a few words, the position of Bentley in the historical series of great scholars :—

" The place of Bentley in literature primarily depends on the fact =that he represents England, among a few great scholars of various countries, who helped to restore classical learning in Europe. Nor is he merely one among them ; he is one with whom an epoch begins. Erasmus marks the highest point reached in the sixteenth century by the genial study of antiquity on its literary side. Soaliger expresses the effort, at once erudite and artistic, to comprehend antiquity as a -whole in the light of verified history. Casaubon embodies the de- voted endeavour to comprehend ancient society in the light of its *recorded manners, without irradiating or disturbing the effect by any play of personal thought or feeling. With Bentley, that large con- -ception of antiquity on the 'real' side is still present, but as a condi- tion tacitly presupposed, not as the evident guide of his immediate 'task. He feels the greatness of his predecessors as it could be felt -only by their peer, but sees that the very foundations on which they built the classical books themselves must be rendered sound, if the edifice is to be upheld or completed. He does not disparage that `higher ' criticism in which his own powers were so signally proved ; rather, his object is to establish it firmly on the only basis which can securely support it, the basis of ascertained texts."

The chapter from which these words are taken seems to us to

state, with great clearness and fairness, the net results of Bentley's life-long labours. It is impossible not to feel, after reading it, that Bentley, with all his faults, is and must remain the protagonist of English scholarship,—the only verbal critic to whom a place in sneh a series as the English Men of Letters can be assigned without exaggeration or incongruity. The task of so maintaining his memory could not have been entrusted to more competent hands, and if in this review we have dwelt on certain defects incident to the scholarly character, and conspicuously exemplified in Bentley, we have done so the more readily because

no trace of similar errors is apparent in the monograph before us. A life of Bentley is essentially a work of scholarship, and we must congratulate Professor Jebb that, in an age when charlatanism and affectation, arrogance and anger, have by no means altogether vanished from philological discussion, he has produced a piece of work so free from all these faults,—at once so thorough and so elegant, so academical and so urbane.