Bentley, RICHARD, scholar, was born of yeoman parentage at Oulton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, January 27, 1662. After four years at Wakefield grammar-school, he entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1676, as subsizar. Little is known of his university career, except that he showed early a strong taste for the cultivation of ancient learning. At the usual time, he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts; and in 1682 he was appointed by his college to the head-mastership of Spalding grammar-school, in Lincolnshire. Within the year he resigned this situation to become tutor to the son of Dr Stillingfleet, then Dean of St Paul's, and subsequently Bishop of Worcester. In 1689 he accompanied his pupil to Oxford, where he had full scope for the cultivation of classical studies; and that he succeeded in acquiring there some local reputation is evinced by his having been twice appointed to deliver the Boyle Lectures on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. He had taken orders in 1690, and to Stillingfleet he owed various good ecclesiastical preferments, with the post of librarian of the King's library at St James's. His Letter to Mill (1691) on the chronicler John Malelas is itself a masterpiece; but it was the Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699), an expansion of an earlier essay, that established his reputation throughout Europe, and may be said to have commenced a new era in scholarship. The principles of historical criticism were then unknown, and their first application to establish that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris (q.v.), which professed to have been written in the 6th century B.C., were the forgery of a period some eight centuries later, filled the learned world with astonishment.
In 1700 Bentley was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and in the following year he married Joanna Bernard, the daughter of a Huntingdonshire knight. The history of Bentley's Mastership of Trinity is the narrative of an unbroken series of quarrels and litigations, provoked by his arrogance and rapacity, for which, it must be confessed, he was fully as well known during his lifetime as for his learning. He contrived, nevertheless, in 1717, to get himself appointed regius professor of Divinity, and, by his boldness and perseverance, managed to pass scathless through all his controversies. Notwithstanding that in 1714 one Bishop of Ely, the visitor of Trinity, was hindered only by death from pronouncing sentence depriving him of his mastership, that in 1718 the university senate deprived him of his degrees, and that in 1734 another bishop did actually pronounce his deposition, he was in full possession of both mastership and degrees at the time of his death. This stormy life did not impair his literary activity. He edited various classics—among others, Horace (1711) and Terence (1726)—upon which he bestowed vast labour. Emendations were at once his forte and foible—the latter conspicuously in his edition of Paradise Lost (1732). He is, perhaps, more celebrated for what he proposed than for what he actually performed. The proposal (1720) to print an edition of the Greek New Testament, in which the received text should be corrected by a careful comparison with the Vulgate and all the oldest existing Greek MSS., was then singularly bold, and evoked violent opposition. He failed in carrying out his proposal; but the principles of criticism which he maintained have since been triumphantly established, and have led to important results in other hands, as in Lachmann's. He is to be regarded as the founder of that school of classical criticism of which Porson afterwards exhibited the chief excellences as well as the chief defects; and which, though it was itself prevented by too strict attention to minute verbal detail from ever achieving much, yet diligently collected many of the facts which men of wider views are still grouping together to form the modern science of comparative philology. Bentley died 14th July 1742, leaving behind him one son, Richard, who inherited much of his father's taste with none of his energy, and two daughters, one of whom, Joanna, married, and was the mother of Richard Cumberland the dramatist. See Monk's Life of Bentley (2 vols. 1833); Jebb's Bentley (1882); and Dyce's unfinished edition of his works (3 vols. 1836–38).