He left no great work; yet what he did in lines of classical criticism could not by any possibility have been better done by others. He supplied interpretations--where the world had blundered and stumbled--which blazed their way to unquestioned acceptance. He mastered all the difficulties of language, and wore the mastership with a proud and insolent self-assertion--a very Goliath of learning, with spear like a weaver's beam, and no son of Jesse to lay him low. One wishing to see his slap-dash manner and his amazing command of authorities should read the _Dissertation on Phalaris_; not a lovable man surely, but prince of all schoolmastery lore: and how rarely we love the schoolmaster! When you meet with that name of {12} Bentley you may safely give it great weight in all scholarly matters, and not so much in matters of taste. Trust him in foot-notes to Aristophanes (a good mate for him!) or to Terence; trust him less in foot-notes to Milton,[9] or even Horace (when he leaves prosody to talk of rhythmic _susurrus_). You will think furthermore of this Dr. Bentley as living through all his fierce battles of criticisms and of college mastership to an extreme old age, and into days when Swift and Pope and Steele and Addison were all gone--a gray, rugged, persistent, captious old man, with a great, full eye that looked one through and through, and with a short nose, turned up--as if he always scented a false quantity in the air. _Two Doctors._ We approach a doctor now as mild and gentle as Bentley was irritable and pugnacious; a man not {13} often enrolled among literary veterans; treated with scorn, maybe, by the professional critics; and yet this name now brought to your attention is I think, tenderly associated with New Englanders' earliest recollections of rhyme or verse; and it is specially these literary firstlings of the memory that it is well for us to trace and hold in hand. Let us listen for a moment to that old cradle hymn: "Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed; Heavenly blessings without number Gently falling on thy head." How the quaint, simple melody lingers yet, coming from far-away times, when it drifted over hundreds of New England homes, which as yet knew not _Pinafore_ nor Mr. Sankey! [Sidenote: Isaac Watts] It is of Dr. Watts's[10] familiar name that I speak: he was the son of a lodging-house keeper in Southampton--in which city a Watts memorial Hall was dedicated as late as 1875. Being a {14} dissenter, he was debarred the advantages of a university education, but he taught dissenters how to put grace into their hymns and sermons; and without being a strong logician, he put such clearness into his _Treatise upon Logic_ as to carry it for a time into the curriculum of Oxford. Our American poet, Bryant, had great admiration for the familiar Watts's version of the 100th Psalm:--