school. The head master at that time was John Baskervile, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the school had a good repute. Among Bentley's younger contemporaries it could claim John Potter, the distinguished classical scholar, who, afterwards became archbishop of Canterbury. In his old age Bentley used to give vivid and humorous accounts of his school-days to his little grandson, Richard Cumberland. He would describe the peculiarities of his masters, and the unjust punishments which he sometimes endured for supposed neglect of his task, 'when the dunces,' he would say, 'could not discover that I was pondering it in my mind,and fixing it more firmly in my memory than if I had been bawling it out amongst the rest of my schoolfellows.'
When the boy was thirteen, his father died, leaving his small estate to a son of his first marriage; and, as Richard had his own way to make, his grandfather Willie decided that at the age of fourteen he should enter the university. It is a common error to suppose that this was an ordinary age at that period for beginning undergraduateship. The ordinary age, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was already seventeen or eighteen; but, where special circumstances required it,exceptions were easily made, since there was then nothing in the nature of the previous examination (or 'little go'). A boy who matriculated at fourteen would have no university examination to pass until he was at least seventeen. Bentley's contemporary, William Wotton, was admitted at St. Catharine's when he was under ten ('infra decem annos,' as the book records); and it is not at all surprising that such a prodigy of precocity as Wotton should have became a bachelor of arts at the age of fourteen. On 24 May 1676 'Ricardus Bentley de Oulton' was enrolled at St. John's College, Cambridge, where certain scholarships founded by Sir Marmaduke Constable were reserved for natives of Yorkshire. St. John's College was then the largest in the university, and no other could have offered greater advantages. Like Isaac Newton at Trinity, and so many Cambridge worthies before and since, Bentley entered as a subsizar; he was presently elected to a Constable scholarship; but he never got a fellowship, because, when he took his degree, two fellowships of St. John's were already held by Yorkshiremen, and a third was not admissible. We know next to nothing about Bentley's undergraduate life at Cambridge. The sole literary relic of it is a jerky and pedantic set of English verses on the Gunpowder plot. There is no record of a competition for the Craven University scholarship (founded in 1647) between 1670 and 1681, so probably Bentley had no opportunity of trying for the chief classical prize then in existence. Logic, ethics, natural philosophy, and mathematics were the reigning studies. In these Bentley acquitted himself with high distinction. His place in the first class of his year (1680) was nominally sixth, but really third, since, according to a preposterous usage of the time, three of the degrees above his were merely honorary.
In 1682, while still a layman and a B.A., he was appointed by St. John's College to the mastership of Spalding school in Lincolnshire, which he held, however, only for a short time. About the end of the year he was chosen by Dr. Stillingfleet, then dean of St. Paul's and formerly a fellow of St. John's College, as tutor to his second son, James, Stillingfleet enjoyed the highest reputation as a learned defender of christianity against infidelity, and especially as a champion of the Anglican church against supposed perils bred of the Restoration. The general arift of his apologetics was historical, and his really wide researches in ecclesiastical history had led him to form one of the best private libraries in England. 'He was tall, graceful, and well-proportioned,' says a contemporary biographer; 'his countenance comely, fresh, and awful; in his conversation cheerful and discreet, obliging and very instructive.' Under his roof Bentley had the double advantage of access to a first-rate library and of intercourse with the best literary society in London. An ardent student of twenty-one could hardly have been more fortunate.
For the next six years (1683–9) Bentley lived in Dr. Stillingfleet's house. Some idea of the industry with which he used his opportunities may be derived from his own notice of one task which he had completed by 1686, i.e., within four years after he came into Stillingfleet's family. 'I wrote, before I was twenty-four years of age, a sort of Hexapla, a thick volume in quarto, in the first column of which I inserted every word of the Hebrew Bible alphabetically; and, in five other columns, all the various interpretations of those words in the Chaldee, Syriac, Vulgate, Latin, Septuagint, and Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, that occur in the whole Bible.' He was also engaged in critical studies of the New Testament. During these same years he was also working at the classics. It is characteristic of his early impulse to enlarge the domain of scholarship that he was already making lists, for his own use, of authors cited by the Greek and Latin grammarians.
