Page images
PDF
EPUB

der the eye of my most timely admonisher, I took all the pains that my years would admit of to deserve his better opinion and regain my lost ground. My diligence was soon followed by success, and success encouraged me to fresh exertions.

I presume the teachers of grammar do not expect boys of a very early age to understand it as a body of rules, but merely as an exercise of memory; yet it is well to imprint it on their memories, that they may more readily apply to it as they advance in their acquaintance with the language. I had naturally a good memory, and practice added such a facility of getting by heart, that in my repetitions, when we challenged for places, I entered the lists with all possible advantages, and soon found myself able to break a lance with the very best of my competitors. The good man in the plaid gown now began to regard me with less than his usual indifference, and my early star was evidently in the ascendant. Such were to me the happy consequences of my worthy master's seasonable admonition.

After the decease of Mrs. Bentley, my mother, whose devotion to her father was return

ed by the warmest affection on his part, passed much of her time, as my father did of his, at Cambridge; there I also passed my holidays, and the undescribable gratification those delightful seasons gave me, hath left traces of the times long past and the persons now dead, that can only be effaced by death, and of their surviving even that I should be loth to lose the hope. I was become capable of understanding my grandfather to be the great man he really was, and began to listen to him with attention, and treasure up his sayings in my mind. I was admitted to dine at his table, had my seat next to his chair, served him in many little offices and went upon his errands with a promptitude and alacrity, that shewed what pride I took in such commissions, and tempted his good nature to invent occasions for employing me.

One day I full well remember my old master Kinsman walked into the room, and was welcomed by my grandfather with the, cordiality natural to him. In the mean time my heart fluttered with alarm and dread of that report, which he had once threatened to prefer against me nothing could be further from his

generous thoughts, and as soon as ever he was at leisure to notice such an insignificant little being, it was with the affection and caresses of a father; when I looked in his face there was no longer any feature of the schoolmaster in it, the terrors of the ferula and the rod were vanished out of sight, and that upright strutting little person, which in authority was so awful, had now relaxed from its rigidity, and no longer strove to swell itself into importance. Arthur notwithstanding was a great man on his own ground, and though he venerated the master of Trinity College, he did not renounce á proper self esteem for the master of Bury School, and the dignity appertaining to that office, which he filled, and to which Bentley himself had once stooped for instruction. He was a gay social fellow, who loved his friend and had no antipathy to his bottle; he had then a kind of dashing discourse, savouring somewhat of the shop, which trifles did not check and contradiction could not daunt. He had at this very time been recreating his spirit with the company in the combination room, and was fairly primed with priestly port. My grandfather I dare say discovered nothing

of this, and Walker, who accompanied Kinsman to the lodge, was exactly in that state when silence is the best resort: Arthur in the mean time, whose tongue conviviality had by no means tied up, began to open his school books upon Bentley, and had drawn him into Homer; Greek now rolled in torrents from the lips of Bentley, and the most learned of moderns chanted forth the inspired rhapsodies of the most illustrious of antients in a strain delectable indeed to the ear, but not very edifying 'to poor little me and the ladies; nay, I should even doubt if the master of Bury School understood all that he heard, but that the worthy vice master of Trinity was innocent of all prehension, and clear of the plot, if treason was wrapped up in it, I can upon my knowledge of him confidently vouch. This however I remember, and my mother has frequently in time past refreshed my recollection of it, that Joshua Barnes in the course of this conversation being quoted by Kinsman as a man understanding Greek and speaking it almost like his mother tongue-"Yes," replied Bentley, "I do believe that Barnes had as much "Greek, and understood it about as well, as

ap

an Athenian blacksmith." Of Pope's Homer he said that he had read it; it was an elegant poem, but no translation. Of the learned Warburton, then in the outset of his fame, he remarked that there seemed to be in him a voracious appetite for knowledge; he doubted if there was a good digestion. This is an anecdote I refer to those, who are competent to make or reject the application.

At no great distance of time from this period, which I have been now recording, Doctor Bentley died and was buried in Trinity College chapel by the side of the altar table, where a square black stone records his name, and nothing more. It remains with the munificence of that rich society to award him other monumental honors, whenever they may think it right to grace his memory with a tablet. He was seized with a complaint, that in his opinion seemed to indicate a necessity of im mediate bleeding; Doctor Heberden, then a young physician practising in Cambridge, was of a contrary opinion, and the patient acquiesced. His friend Doctor Wallis, in whose skilful practice and experience he so justly placed his confidence, was unfortunately ab→

« PreviousContinue »