siderate dictum sit.' It appears that Hermann's Reizius never mentioned Bentley's name without some mark of respect to the man, whom he considered the model of a perfect critic.

It was probably under the influence of similar feelings to those expressed by the quondam dictator in Latin composition, that Bishop Monk was led to regret that Bentley did not devote himself to editing Greek authors alone; a regret, in which all who love the nobler language of more original thinkers will be ready to join; not because Bentley was incompetent to the task he undertook, but because so few men can achieve what he neglected. Had Porson's MSS. not been destroyed by fire, or had he possessed greater means,2 and been bless

ed with an antivinous affection, and' contented himself with the crystalline stream of Helicon, without sighing for the brandy and water of the Cyder Cellar, all that Bentley did not do, Porson, aided by a Dawes, a Toup, a Tyrwhitt, and a Dobree, in this country, and by the illustrious trio of the Dutch school, might have done, and have given us a whole body of dramatic Greek, that would have left only gleanings for future scholars to supply. Such are our sentiments; Mr. Coleridge thinks otherwise, for he asks, 'Were there no objects to which the powers and acquirements of a Bentley might have been applied, more important than disputed readings, dislocated sentences, points3 misplaced, and accents turned the wrong

1 Great as Parr confessedly was in Latin, it is strange that he never edited any Latin author. In the Appendix to the Memoirs of Dr. John Taylor, p. xlv. 'I desired,' says he, Dr. Burney, who had all the editions of Terentianus Mauras, to lend them to me; but he said they were pre-engaged by the very learned Mr. Gais. ford, by whom I was asked if I had any Collectanea; to whom I gave such an answer as ought to be given to a scholar, with whom I had not the honour of being much acquainted. I should have answered honest John Taylor very differently.'

2 To this destruction of his MSS. and the non-fulfilment of Tyrwhitt's intention to make Porson his heir, is doubtless to be attributed Porson's adoption of the sentiment of Cratinus, which Horace has made so familiar to all, that "Yoop ó ívov XPHOTOν ovdev av Tooî,-and to the inspiration of which we owe Sheridan's song,

This bottle's the Sun of our table, Whose rays are the rosy wine.'-With this single failing, so excusable in an admirer of the drama of Athens, and who thought every thing but a dram to be ovdèv πρòs Aióvvσov, it may be said of Porson, as of Socrates by Plato, by Horace of Quintilian, and by Shakespere of Falstaff-' we ne'er shall look upon his like again.' Enough and more than enough,' said Dr. Parr, have I heard in the prattle of finical collectors and the cavils of half-learned gossips, of the little oversights of Porson, a giant in literature, a prodigy in intellect, and a critic whose mighty achievements and stupendous power strike down all the restless and aspiring suggestions of rivalry into silent admiration and passive awe. I know that spots exist in Porson, but they are lost in the blaze of his excellencies; and I think that his claims to public veneration are too vast to be measured by the short and crooked rules of his detractors; too massy to be lifted by their feeble efforts, and even too sacred to be touched by their unhallowed hands.'

3 By way of blunting the edge of this pointed sneer, we will quote four passages to prove how sense may be made out of nonsense by altering merely the place of a point and turning an accent. In Horat. Od. 111. 24, 25. O quisquis volet impias Cædes et rabiem tollere civium,'-as there is nothing to answer to 'quisquis, whoever,' Bentley reads 'O quis quis,'— ' O, who, who,'-and thus introduces a spirited interrogation in place of a tame assertion. In Od. II. 16, 18. Quid terras alio calentes Sole mutamus? patriæ quis exul se quoque fugit,' '-as there is no ablative to show what countries are, changed for what some unknown scholar would read, -Quid terras-mutamus patriâ quis exsul,-a reading of which even Bentley did not admire the beauty nor admit the truth; but which will now become the established one, not because the fanciful Wakefield, but a dull Doering has adopted it. So in Sat.. 11. 5, 59. 'O Laertiade, quicquid dicam aut erit, aut non; Divinare etenim magnus mihi donat Apollo,'-the thief Valart has stolen from some one-quidquid dicam aut erit, aut non Divinare mihi magnus donavit Apollo;' although we should prefer-' Divinâ re artem magicus mihi donat Apollo,'-on account of the magicas-artes of Virgil. With regard to the benefit from changing an accent we may

refer to Pseudo-Theocrit. Id. xxvI. 14. Σὺν δετάραξε ποσὶν μανιώδεος ὄργια Βάκχου-some scholar would read not ποσὶν * with his feet —but πόσιν μανιώδεα T'opyia, the drinking and mad orgies,' and who might have referred to Eurip. Bacch. 796. Θύσωφον ὁν γὲ θῆλυν ὥσπερ ἄξιαι, Πολὺν ταράξας ἐν Κιθαιρώνος πτυχαῖς, and corrected—Ποτὸν ταράξας.

'Of course, Mr. C., you have never looked into Kidd's edition of that eagle-eyed Grecian, the unhappy Dawes, of whom, though he speak ill of me unjustly, I can speak justly in praise; for had you so done you would have seen, that we do know quite as much of the Digamma as we know of any other letter in the Greek alphabet; of its form, sound and value; and that even the ridicule thrown upon it in the Dunciad would have exhibited the dunce, not towering, like my5 Digamma, but cut down to his own pigmy form of a crooked and crabbed satirist, had not Payne Knight carried out my principles to an absurd length, and thus weakened the cause he was anxious to support; for it has given rise to your otherwise incorrect remark, that however the Digamma was pronounced, it must have been very offensive to the ear;' just as the W would be in English, if instead of V and W being confined each to its own word, both were confounded, and the last become the favourite in the mouth of a Cockney, when he is singing,

Weal, Wine, and Winegar, are wery good
Wittles, WOW.

'Good bye, Mr. Coleridge; for already does my ghost scent the horse

laugh at an Eutropius, who, when he next attempts a life, should wield with a hand not so unsteady, nor so much affected by a light brain, a blade not quite so blunt, as a rounded style.'

Since then Mr. C. has mentioned what Bentley might have done, it is for us to say what he has done, and then to leave the reader to look on this picture and on that.'

Antecedent to the time of Bentley, England had done but little for the cause of classical literature, directly or indirectly. Gale had published his Herodotus in a very creditable way to himself and with signal advantage to his author, as he first gave a collation of the Sancroft MS. at present in Emanuel College; and by the aid of which Professor Gaisford might still have corrected the text of the father of history in very many passages. Gataker, too, whom Porson, extremely chary of his praise, designates deservedly by the title of doctissimus, had edited his Marcus Antoninus, and enriched it with notes that exhibit a thorough acquaintance with authors whose names are scarcely known to the profoundly learned in this march-of-intellect æra. Pearson, too, the Bishop of Chester, 'the very dust of whose writings was gold' in

4 For the hostility of Dawes to Bentley it is in vain to pretend to account at this distance of time, and with the few documents we possess of that scholar's life, to whom, next to Bentley, Greek literature in general, and even more than to Bentley the Attic dialect in particular, are indebted for all we know of their syntactical peculiarities. Bishop Monk thinks that Dick Dawes was desirous to be the jack-daw of Horace, and to array himself in the feathers of the Trinity peacock. But can his lordship produce a single passage, where the quondam Emanuel bell-ringer, and subsequently the Tyne boatman, acted, as more fortunate Trinity-men have done, the part of a plagiarist? His lordship thinks also that in Dawes, as in Virgil's deer, hæsit lateri lethalis arundo,'-when the veteran Aristarchus, after perusing Dawes' specimen of his intended translation of Milton's Paradise Lost into Greek hexameters, probably sneered at the Emmanuel chick, essaying the flight of the yéparos dovλixódeipos of Homer; and his lordship might have added that it was upon this occasion probably, that Bentley translated the Pindarum quisquis' of Horace, so highly praised by Johnson, and preserved in the inimitable Boswell's Life of the great Aristarchus of English literature. In further confirmation of his lordship's notion, we beg leave to suggest, that, as Dawes upon subsequent reading discovered Bentley to be invulnerable in Homeric Greek, he determined to see, what in truth he found, whether he was not vulnerable in Attic Greek.

5 Bentley ought rather to have called it the Digamma of Isaac Vossius; for he was, we believe, the first critic, who restored that letter to its proper place, at least in Æolic poetry. See his notes on Catullus, the chief value of which is in what relates to that subject. After Bentley, the question was taken up by Taylor in his 'Lectiones Lysiacæ;' and more recently by Thiersch in his Homeric Grammar; who has done with the roots of verbs what Payne Knight did with the inflexions of nouns, and made the introduction and omission of the Digamma the test of obsolete and more recent forms.

the eyes of Bentley, had shown, by his Vindicia Ignatianæ and his posthumous papers on the genuine Epistles of Ignatius, published by Smith, that he would have made, in the language of Porson, a first-rate verbal critic, had he not fuddled his head6 with divinity.' Thomas Stanley, too, had given an edition of Eschylus, which, after all that has been done for that author during a century and a half, is still, as a complete edition, the most learned and original of all that have appeared. But it was left for Bentley to raise his country at once to the pinnacle of greatness in the annals of Greek criticism, and to show that we must learn the meaning of the words before we talk of the ideas of a writer, and look to the language before we presume to judge of facts;-that without a close attention to syntax and metre, we can know nothing of the poetry of Greece, on which the greater part of its prose depends.

Thus, for instance, with respect to the Digamma, had not Bentley discovered the metrical value of the letter, the recovery of the letter itself

would have been but of little consequence; for we should then have wanted, what we now possess, the most convincing proof that the Iliad is older than the Odyssey by at least two centuries.

Again, had not Bentley possessed the power to detect an Iambic verse lying hid in prose, we should have wanted one of the strongest arguments to prove the spuriousness of the Phalaris Epistles.

Further, had not Bentley shown that, in criticism as in war, nothing is to be neglected, and that means apparently the most contemptible may lead to great and unexpected results, it is pretty clear that but for the example set him by Bentley, Dawes would have been unable to prove the spuriousness of an ode usually attributed to Pindar; nor would Porson have discovered that the last scene of the Iphigenia in Aulis was the production of an author who lived after the time of Elian, had he not been led by Bentley first, and Dawes afterwards, to investigate the laws of the tragic trimeter, as the former had done, with regard to the Synapheia of

6 For this expression of Porson's we are not answerable, although it must be conceded that sacred and verbal criticism have not often been united in the same person. Valckenaer indeed speaks highly of his master Schultens in both characters, and the same may be said of Gataker, whose Adversaria Miscellanea Postuma, and Dissertatio de Stylo N. T. plainly show that he was, like Grotius and Erasmus, tam Christi quam Apollinis satelles.' Of Pearson's attention to verbal criticism a sufficient proof is furnished by his MS. notes on Hesychius still preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge, and which are particularly valuable for the list there given of the foreign words, which were Græcised, and to be found in Hesychius, and arranged by Pearson under the heads of the respective nations. It was probably from a faint recollection given by Porson of these notes to Gaisford, that the latter was led to believe the existence of Pearson's notes on Suidas. It was from such incompatibility in the pursuits of a divine and a verbal critic that Bentley, who originally meant to devote himself to sacred literature, turned to profane. So, too, did Valckenaer, who says that when he was a young man he paid much attention to Biblical literature, and had made many emendations on the Old and New Testament; but that he afterwards gave up the study, for he found that he had given offence to some persons whom he alludes to under the name of Curii in his Diatrib. p. 205. With regard to Bentley's intended edition of the New Testament, it is impossible to suppose that Bentley would have refrained from conjectural alterations, since even less dashing scholars than he have indulged in them, as may be seen in Bowyer's Conjectures on the New Testament. But his great object was to obtain, by means of the Latin Vulgate, the original Greek, and especially in what relates to the order of the words; and he would doubtless have been as successful as others have been in restoring Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, from the Latin versions of Valla, Ficinus, Bessario, and Thomas Aquinas, all of whom had access to Greek MSS. frequently better than any at present in existence. It is not then without reason that Chalmers says of Bentley, that the loss of his Greek Testament may be considered as depriving the author of what would have probably handed down his name to posterity with the highest honours due to critical accuracy and acumen.'

7 This was the peculiar feature of Bentley's 'Emendationes in Menandrum;' on which Mr. Coleridge well observes that the precise determination of the rules and licences of the ancient dramatic measures, which has guided conjecture to certainty, and enabled the commentator to discern the just outline of an original picture through the successive coatings of false colour, was in the days of Grotius utterly unknown; and whatever is now known is owing to Bentley; for he first pointed out whatever was wanted, and where it was to be obtained.

8 Of these the first and foremost is Julius Pollux. Of the Onomasticon, whatever may be the value set upon it by Bentley and other Grecians familiar with it, Mr. Coleridge says, of course not without a cursory glance at it, that it is a comparatively recent production, and may take rank somewhere between Captain Grose and Dr. Kitchener; that its principal value depends upon the fragments of Greek comedy, with which it abounds; that it was edited by Tiberius Hemsterhuis, when he was only eighteen years old; to whom Bentley wrote two letters containing his emendations of the comic fragments found so abundantly in the last bock, and on the correction of which the juvenile Tiberius prided himself; and that these letters, instead of ap