But the bickerings and animosities of the smaller fry were magnified, not obliterated, by the Doctor himself in the conduct of his own affairs. The courtesy and good temper which he had shown in his early controversies had worn away. “. . . a course of violent animosities and the indulgence of unrestrained indignation for many years had impaired both his taste and judgement in controversy”, and he condescended, though the subject in dispute was the Greek Testament, to call his antagonist “maggot”, “vermin”, “gnawing rat”, and “cabbage head”, to refer to the darkness of his complexion, and to insinuate that his wits were crazed, which charge he supported by dwelling on the fact that his brother, a clergyman, wore a beard to his girdle. Violent, pugnacious, and unscrupulous. Dr. Bentley survived these storms and agitations, and remained, though suspended from his degrees and deprived of his mastership, seated at the Lodge imperturbably. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat indoors to protect his eyes, smoking his pipe, enjoying his port, and expounding to his friends his doctrine of the digamma, Bentley lived those eighty years which, he said, were long enough “to read everything which was worth reading”, “Et tunc”, he added, in his peculiar manner. Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago. A small square stone marked his grave in Trinity College, but the Fellows refused to record upon it the fact that he had been their Master. But the strangest sentence in this strange story has yet to be written, and Bishop Monk writes it as if it were a commonplace requiring no comment. “For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical taste to venture upon such a task was no common presumption.” The task was to detect every slip of language in _Paradise Lost_, and all instances of bad taste and incorrect imagery. The result was notoriously lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept his verdict upon Horace and Homer? And if we cannot trust implicitly to scholars, and if the study of Greek is supposed to refine the manners and purify the soul—but enough. Our scholar has returned from Hall; his lamp is lit; his studies are resumed; and it is time that our profane speculations should have an end. Besides, all this happened many, many years ago. III LADY DOROTHY NEVILL