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but the native candour and inherent tenderness 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 with out 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 VOL. XLIX.

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, Dr. Bentley interposed, saying, "Why tell the man he is a thief? he knows that well enough, without thy information, Greaves.-Harkye, feliow, 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 can'st gain nothing but a halter, and follow that by which thou may'st carn 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 Collins had fallen into decay of circumstances, Dr. 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 overbearing man will find himself a solitary being in 3 G creation;

creation; Dr. Bentley, on the contrary, had many intimates. Judicious in forming his friendships, was faithful in adhering to them. With sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Mead, Dr. Wallis of Stamford, Baron Spauheim, 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 Dr. 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.

His domestic habits, when I knew him, were still those of unabated study. He slept in the room adjoining to his library, and was never 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 took 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 Coverly, 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, 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 St. 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,

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 ine, 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 apophthegms, 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 aud interruptions, I seldom failed to reader myself obnoxious, and obtaiu 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 accomplishment; 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 wordly 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 gratifying to the taste of a man of his spirit and sensibility; the one could not be ab- · ject, and the other, I suspect, was not by nature very liberal and largeminded. 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-andseek 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,

3 G 2

the

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, while Gray reposes under the shade of a flourishing laurel in all the diguity of learned ease. Such a design, with figures so contrasted, might flatter Gray, and gratify the trivial taste of Walpole; but in my poor opinion, it is a satire in copperplate, and my uncle has most completely libelled both his poet and his patron without intending so to do.

Elizabeth Bentley, eldest daughter of her father, first married Humphry Ridge, esquire, and after his decease the Rev. Dr. Favell, fellow of Trinity college, and after his mar riage with my aunt, Rector of Witton, near Huntingdon, in the gift of sir John Bernard, of Brampton. She was an honourable and excellent lady; I had cause to love her and lament her death. She inherited the virtues and benignity of her mother, with habits more adapted to the fashions of the world.

Joanna, the younger of Dr. Bentley's daughters, and the Phoebe of Byron's pastoral, was my mother. I will not violate the allegiance I have vowed to truth, in giving any other character of her than what in conscience I regard as just and faithful. She had a vivacity of fancy and a strength of intellect, in which few were her superiors: she read much, remembered well, and discerned accutely: I never knew the person who could better embellish any subject she was upon, or render common incidents more entertaining by the happy art of relating them; her invention was so fertile, her ideas were

so original, and the points of humour so ingeniously and unexpectedly taken up in the progress of her narrative, that she never failed to accomplish zil the purposes which the gaiety of her imagination could lay itself out for: she had a quick intuition into characters, and a faculty of marking out the ridiculous, when it came within her view, which of course I must confess she made rather too frequent use of. Her social powers were brilliant, but not uniform, for on some occzsions she would persist in a determined taciturnity, to the regret of the company present; and at other times would lead off in her best manner, when, perhaps, none were present who could taste the spirit and amenity of her humour. There hardly passed a day in which she failed to devote a portion of her time to the reading of the bible: and her comments and expositions might have merited the attention of the wise and learned. Though strictly pious, there was no gloom in her religion; but on the contrary, such was the happy faculty which she possessed, of making every doctrine pleasant, every duty sweet, that what some instructors would have represented as a burden and a yoke, she contrived to recommend as a recreation and delight. All that son can owe to parent, or disciple to his teacher, I owe to her.

Soon after Mr. Cumberland's admission at Trinity College, he says, "In that period my stock of books was but slender, till Dr. Richard Bentley had the goodness to give me a

valuable parcel of my grandfather's books and papers, containing his correspondence with many of the foreign literati upon points of criticism, some letters from sir Isaac Newton, a pretty large body of notes for an edition of

Lucau's

Lucan's Pharsalia, which I gave to my uncle Bentley, and were published under his inspection by Dodsley, at Mr. Walpole's press, with sundry other manuscripts, and a considerable number of Greek and Latin books, mostly collated by him, and their margins filled with alterations and corrections in his own hand, neatly and legibly written in written in a very small character. The possession of these books was most gratifying and acceptable to me; some few of them were extremely rare, and in the history I have given in The Observers of the Greek writers, more particularly of the Comic Poets now lost, I have availed myself of them, and I am vain enough to believe no such collection of the scattered extracts, anecdotes, and remains of those dramatists is any where else to be found. The donor of these books was the nephew of my grandfather, and inherited by will the whole of his library, which at his death was sold by auction in Leicester, where he resided in his latter years on his rectory of Nailstone: he was himself no inconsiderable collector, and it is much to be regretted that his executors took this method of disposing of his books, by which they became dispersed in small lots among many country purchasers, who probably did not know their value. He was an accurate collator, and for his judgment in editions much resorted to by Dr. Mead, with whom he lived in great intimacy. During the time that he resided in college, for he was one of the senior fellows of Trinity, he gave me every possible proof, not only in this instance of his donation, but in many others, of his favour and protection.

Fall and Character of Llewelyn, the last Sovereign Prince of Wales.

[From Mr. Jones's History of Brecknockshire.]

In the year 1281, a war had just commenced between Edward the First and Llewelyn, which the humanity of Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, endeavoured to prevent; he even undertook a journey into Wales for that purpose, heard with patierce, and apparently without prejudice, the complaints of Llewelyn; dictated in language which would not disgrace the orators of any age or country; almost admitted the truth of his assertions and the force of his arguments; seemed to feel for the injuries of the prince and principality, and returned to England in expectation that they would be redressed; but the die was now thrown, and the resolution of Edward irrevocably fixed. A wise and sound policy, productive at the time (it is true) of calamities that may be deplored, and outrages which must be condemned, yet ultimately tending to promote the peace and happiness of both countries, suggested to this enterprizing monarch the neces sity of uniting Wales with England; and the hatred of a rival in arms, as well as in talents, though inferior in force, confirmed him in his determination. Llewelyn ap Griffith had frequently, and indeed recently, foiled him in his attempts to subjugate the rough natives of the barren mountains, and had formerly sent him bootless back to the fat pastures of England, if not with disgrace, at least with mortification and disappointment; but that persevering po tentate, skilled as he was in every 3G 3 brauch

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