It is certain that in your forays into the literature of these times--if made with any earnestness--you will come upon the name of Dr. Bentley;[7] if nowhere else, then attached to critical footnotes at the bottom of books. His demolition of the claims, long maintained by an older generation of scholars, respecting certain _Epistles of Phalaris_, commanded attention {10} at an early stage of his career, and showed ability to cross swords, in a scholastic and bitter way, with such men as Atterbury and Boyle; and--if need were--with such others as Sir William Temple and Dr. Swift. As early as 1700 he had come to the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge (where a portrait of him by Thornhill now hangs in the Master's Lodge), a proud position--made prouder by his large hospitalities. He had a sensible wife, courteous "for two"--as many scholars' wives have need to be--and two daughters; one of whom inheriting the father's sharp tongue, made a good many young fellows of the college sing; and made some of them sigh too--marrying at last a certain young Cumberland, who became the father of Richard Cumberland, the poet and dramatist.[8] Some small chronicler tells us of his preference for port over claret; indeed he loved all intense things, rather than things diluted, and was inaccessible to those finer, milder, delicater {11} graces--whether of wine or poetry--which ripen under long reposeful workings. I spoke of a portrait of him in the Master's Lodge; there was another in Pope's _Dunciad_--not so flattering: "The mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains; Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain, Critics like me shall make it prose again." --Lib. iv., 211 _et seq._ [Sidenote: Bentley's scholarship]