of his heart could not long be veiled from observation, for his feelings and affections were at once too impulsive to be long repressed, and he too careless of concealment to attempt at qualifying them. Such was his sensibility towards human sufferings, that it became a duty with his family to divert the conversation from all topics of that sort; and if he touched upon them himself he was betrayed into agitations, which if the reader ascribes to paralytic weakness, he will very greatly mistake a man, who to the last hour of his life possessed his faculties firm and in their fullest vigour; I therefore bar all such misinterpretations as may attempt to set the mark of infirmity upon those emotions, which had no other source and origin but in the natural and pure benevolence of his heart. He was communicative to all without distinction, that sought information, or resorted to him for assistance; fond of his college almost to enthusiasm, and ever zealous for the honour of the purple gown of Trinity. When he held examinations for fellowships, and the modest candidate exhibited marks of agitation and alarm, he never failed to interpret candidly of such symptoms; and on those occasions he was never known to press the hesitating and embarrassed examinant, but oftentimes on the contrary would take all the pains of expounding on himself, and credit the exonerated candidate for answers and interpretations of his own suggesting. If this was not rigid justice, it was, at least in my conception of it, something better and more amiable; and how liable he was to deviate from the strict line of justice, by his partiality to the side of mercy, appears from the anecdote of the thief, who robbed him of his plate, and was seized and brought before him with the very articles upon him: the natural process in this man's case pointed out the road to prison; my grandfather's process was more summary, but not quite so legal. While commissary Greaves, who was then present, and of counsel for the college Ex officio, was expatiating on the crime, and prescribing the measures obviously to be taken with the offender, Doctor Bentley interposed, saying, "Why tell "the man he is a thief? he knows that well enough, without thy "information, Greaves.-Harkye, fellow, thou see'st the trade "which thou hast taken up is an unprofitable trade, therefore, get "thee gone, lay aside an occupation by which thou canʼst gain no"thing but a halter, and follow that by which thou may'st earn an ❝ honest livelihood." Having said this, he ordered him to be set at liberty against the remonstrances of the bye-standers, and insisting upon it that the fellow was duly penitent for his offence, bade him go his way, and never steal again. I leave it with those, who consider mercy as one of man's best attributes, to suggest a plea for the informality of this proceeding, and to such I will communicate one other anecdote, which I do not deliver upon my own knowledge, though from unexceptionable authority, and this is, that when Collina had fallen into decay of circumstances, Doctor Bentley, suspecting he had written him out of credit by his Philoleutherus Lipsiensis, secretly contrived to administer to the necessities of his baffled opponent, in a manner that did no less credit to his delicacy than to his liberality. A morose and over-bearing man will find himself a solitary being in creation; Doctor Bentley on the contrary had many intimates; judicious in forming his friendships, he was faithful in adhering to them. With Sir Isaac Newton, Doctor Mead, Doctor Wallis of Stamford, Baron Spanheim, the lamented Roger Cotes, and several other distinguished and illustrious contemporaries, he lived on terms of uninterrupted harmony, and I have good authority for saying, that it is to his interest and importunity with Sir Isaac Newton, that the inestimable publication of the Principia was ever resolved upon by that truly great and luminous philosopher. Newton's portrait by Sir James Thornhill, and those of Baron Spanheim and my grandfather by the same hand, now hanging in the Master's lodge of Trinity, were the bequest of Doctor Bentley. I was possessed of letters in Sir Isaac's own hand to my grandfather, which together with the corrected volume of bishop Cumberland's Laws of Nature, I lately gave to the library of that flourishing and illustrious college. The irreparable loss of Roger Cotes in early life, of whom Newton had pronounced-Now the world will know something, Doctor Bentley never mentioned but with the deepest regret; he had formed the highest expectations of new lights and discoveries in philosophy from the penetrating force of his extraordinary genius, and on the tablet devoted to his memory, in the chapel of Trinity College, Doctor Bentley has recorded his sorrows and those of the whole learned world in the following beautiful and pathetic epitaph: H. S. E. "Rogerus Roberti filius Cotes, "Sed egregia, sed admiranda, “Cui ad summam Doctrinæ laudem, "Gratiores venirent. "Natus Burbagii His domestic habits, when I knew him, were still those of unabated study: he slept in the room adjoining to his library, and was Dever with his family till the hour of dinner; at these times he seemed to have detached himself most completely from his studies; never appearing thoughtful and abstracted, but social, gay, and possessing perfect serenity of mind and equability of temper. He never dictated topics of conversation to the company he was with, but tool them up as they came in his way, and was a patient listener to other people's discourse, however trivial or uninteresting it might be. When The Spectators were in publication I have heard my mother say he took great delight in hearing them read to him, and was so particularly amused by the character of Sir Roger de Coverley, that he took his literary decease most seriously to heart. She also told me, that, when in conversation with him on the subject of his works, C she found occasion to lament that he had bestowed so great a portion of his time and talents upon criticism instead of employing them upon original composition, he acknowledged the justice of her regret with extreme sensibility, and remained for a considerable time thoughtful and seemingly embarrassed by the nature of her remark; at last recollecting himself he said "Child, I am sensible I have ❝not always turned my talents to the proper use for which I should presume they were given to me: yet I have done something for "the honour of my God and the edification of my fellow creatures; "but the wit and genius of those old heathens beguiled me, and as "I despaired of raising myself up to their standard upon fair ground, "I thought the only chance I had of looking over their heads was "to get upon their shoulders." Of his pecuniary affairs he took no account; he had no use for money, and dismissed it entirely from his thoughts: his establishment in the mean time was respectable, and his table affluently and hospitably served. All these matters were conducted and arranged in the best manner possible by one of the best women living; for such, by the testimony of all who knew her, was Mrs. Bentley, daughter of Sir John Bernard, of Brampton, in Huntingdonshire, a family of great opulence and respectability, allied to the Cromwells and Saint Johns, and by intermarriages connected with other great and noble houses. I have perfect recollection of the person of my grandmother, and a full impression of her manners and habits, which, though in some degree tinctured with hereditary reserve and the primitive cast of character, were entirely free from the hypocritical cant and affected sanctity of the Oliverians. Her whole life was modelled on the purest principles of piety, benevolence and Christian charity; and in her dying moments, my mother being present and voucher of the fact, she breathed out her soul in a kind of beatific vision, exclaiming in rapture as she expired-It is all bright, it is all glorious! I was frequently called upon by her to repeat certain scriptural texts and passages, which she had taught me, and for which I seldom failed to be rewarded, but by which I was also frequently most completely puzzled and bewildered; so that I much doubt if the good effects of this practice upon immature and infantine understandings, will be found to keep pace with the good intentions of those who adopt it. One of these holy apothegms, viz:-The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good, I remember to have cost me many a struggle to interpret, and the result of my construction was directly opposite to the spirit and meaning of the text. I was also occasionally summoned to attend upon the readings of long sermons and homilies of Baxter, as I believe, and others of his period; neither by these was I edified, but, on the contrary, so effectually wearied, that by noises and interruptions I seldom failed to render myself obnoxious, and obtain my dismission before the reading was over. The death of this exemplary lady preceded that of my grandfather by a few years only, and by her he had one son, Richard, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Joanna. Richard was a man of various and considerable accomplishments; he had a fine genius, great wit and a brilliant imagination; he had also the manners and address of a perfect gentleman, but there was a certain eccentricity and want of worldly prudence in my uncle's character, that involved him in distresses, and reduced him to situations uncongenial with his feelings, and unpropitious to the cultivation and encouragement of his talents. His connexion with Mr. Horace Walpole, the late Lord Orford, had too much of the bitter of dependence in it to be gratify. ing to the taste of a man of his spirit and sensibility; the one could not be abject, and the other, I suspect, was not by nature very liberal and large-minded. They carried on, for a long time, a sickly kind of friendship, which had its hot fits and its cold; was suspended and renewed, but I believe never totally broken and avowedly laid aside. Walpole had by nature a propensity, and by constitution a plea, for being captious and querulential, for he was a martyr to the gout. He wrote prose and published it; he composed verses and circulated them, and was an author, who seemed to play at hide-and-seek with the public. There was a mysterious air of consequence in his private establishment of a domestic printing press, that seemed to augur great things, but performed little. Walpole was already an author with no great claims to excellence, Bentley had those powers in embryo, that would have enabled him to excel, but submitted to be the projector of Gothic embellishments for Strawberry Hill, and humble designer of drawings to ornament a thin folio of a meagre collection of odes by Gray, the most costive of poets, edited at the Walpolian press. In one of these designs Bentley has personified himself as a monkey, sitting under a withered tree with his pallet in his hand, |