BENT, JAMES THEODORE BERRYER, ANTOINE PIERRE
BENT BERSERKER
BENTHAM, GEORGE BERT, PAUL
BENTHAM, JEREMY BERTANI, AGOSTINO
BENTINCK, LORD WILLIAM BERTAT
BENTINCK, LORD WILLIAM CAVENDISH BERTAUT, JEAN
BENTIVOGLIO, GIOVANNI BERTH
BENTIVOGLIO, GUIDO BERTHELOT, MARCELLIN PIERRE EUGENE
BENTLEY, RICHARD (scholar) BERTHIER, LOUIS ALEXANDRE
BENTLEY, RICHARD (publisher) BERTHOLLET, CLAUDE LOUIS
BENTON, THOMAS HART BERTHON, EDWARD LYON
BENTON HARBOR BERTHOUD, FERDINAND
BENUE BERTILLON, LOUIS ADOLPHE
BEN VENUE BERTIN
BENZALDEHYDE BERTINORO, OBADIAH
BENZENE BERTINORO
BENZIDINE BERTOLD
BENZOIC ACID BERTOLD VON REGENSBURG
BENZOIN (ketone-alcohol) BERTRAM, CHARLES
BENZOIN (balsamic resin) BERTRAND, HENRI GRATIEN
BENZOPHENONE BERTRICH
BENZYL ALCOHOL BERULLE, PIERRE DE
BEOTHUK BERVIE
BEOTHY, ODON BERWICK, JAMES FITZJAMES
BEOWULF BERWICKSHIRE
BEQUEST BERWICK-UPON-TWEED
BERAIN, JEAN BERYL
BERANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE BERYLLIUM
BERAR BERYLLONITE
BERARD, JOSEPH FREDERIC BERZELIUS, JONS JAKOB
BERAT BES
BERAUN BESANCON
BERBER BESANT, SIR WALTER
BERBERA BESENVAL DE BRONSTATT, PIERRE VICTOR
BERBERINE BESKOW, BERNHARD VON
BERBERS BESNARD, PAUL ALBERT
BERCEUSE BESOM
BERCHEM, NICOLAAS BESSARABIA
BERCHTA BESSARION, JOHANNES
BERCHTESGADEN BESSBOROUGH, EARLS OF
BERCK BESSEGES
BERDICHEV BESSEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM
BERDYANSK BESSEL FUNCTION
BEREA BESSEMER, SIR HENRY
BEREKHIAH NAQDAN BESSEMER
BERENGARIUS BESSIERES, JEAN BAPTISTE
BERENGER, ALPHONSE THOMAS BESSUS
BERENICE (princesses) BEST, WILLIAM THOMAS
BERENICE (seaport of Egypt) BESTIA
BERESFORD, LORD DE LA POER BESTUZHEV-RYUMIN, ALEXIUS PETROVICH
BERESFORD, JOHN BESTUZHEV-RYUMIN, MIKHAIL PETROVICH
BERESFORD, WILLIAM BERESFORD BET and BETTING
BEREZINA BETAINE
BEREZOV BETEL NUT
BEREZOVSK BETHANY
BERG BETHEL
BERGAMASK BETHENCOURT, JEAN DE
BERGAMO BETHESDA (Jerusalem)
BERGAMOT, OIL OF BETHESDA (Wales)
BERGEDORF BETH-HORON
BERGEN BETHLEHEM (Palestine)
BERGEN-OP-ZOOM BETHLEHEM (Pennsylvania, U.S.A.)
BERGERAC BETHLEHEMITES
BERGHAUS, HEINRICH BETHLEN, GABRIEL
BERGK, THEODOR BETHNAL GREEN
BERGLER, STEPHAN BETHUNE {family)
BERGMAN, TORBERN OLOF BETHUNE, CONON DE
BERGSCHRUND BETHUNE (town of France)
BERGUES BETROTHAL
BERHAMPUR (Bengal, India) BETTERMENT
BERHAMPUR (Madras, India) BETTERTON, THOMAS
BERI-BERI BETTIA
BERING, VITUS BETTINELLI, SAVERIO
BERING ISLAND, SEA and STRAIT BETTWS Y COED
BERING SEA ARBITRATION BETTY, WILLIAM HENRY WEST
BERIOT, CHARLES AUGUSTE DE BETUL
BERJA BETWA
BERKA BEUDANT, FRANCOIS SULPICE
BERKELEY (English family) BEUGNOT, JACQUES CLAUDE
BERKELEY, GEORGE BEULE, CHARLES ERNEST
BERKELEY, MILES JOSEPH BEURNONVILLE, PIERRE DE RUEL
BERKELEY, SIR WILLIAM BEUST, FRIEDRICH FERDINAND VON
BERKELEY (California, U.S.A.) BEUTHEN (Niederbeuthen)
BERKELEY (town of England) BEUTHEN (Oberbeuthen)
BERKHAMPSTEAD BEVEL
BERKSHIRE, THOMAS HOWARD BEVERLEY, WILLIAM ROXBY
BERKSHIRE BEVERLEY
BERLAD BEVERLY
BERLICHINGEN, GOETZ BEVIS OF HAMPTON
BERLIN, ISAIAH BEWDLEY
BERLIN (German city) BEWICK, THOMAS
BERLIN (New Hampshire, U.S.A.) BEXHILL
BERLIN (Ontario, Canada) BEXLEY, NICHOLAS VANSITTART
BERLIN (carriage) BEXLEY
BERLIOZ, HECTOR BEY
BERM BEYBAZAR
BERMONDSEY BEYLE, MARIE HENRI
BERMUDAS BEYRICH, HEINRICH ERNST VON
BERMUDEZ BEYSCHLAG, WILLIBALD
BERN (Swiss canton) BEZA, THEODORE
BERN (Swiss city) BEZANT
BERNARD, SAINT BEZANTEE
BERNARD OF CHARTRES BEZBORODKO, ALEKSANDER ANDREEVICH
BERNARD, CHARLES DE BEZEL
BERNARD, CLAUDE BEZIQUE
BERNARD, JACQUES BEZWADA
BERNARD, MOUNTAGUE BHAGALPUR
BERNARD, SIMON BHAMO
BERNARD, SIR THOMAS BHANDARA
BERNARDIN OF SIENA, ST BHANG
BERNAUER, AGNES BHARAHAT
BERNAY BHARAL
BERNAYS, JAKOB BHARATPUR
BERNBURG BHATGAON
BERNERS, JOHN BOURCHIER BHATTIANA
BERNERS, JULIANA BHAU DAJI
BERNHARD OF SAXE-WEIMAR BHAUNAGAR
BERNHARDT, SARAH BHEESTY
BERNHARDY, GOTTFRIED BHERA
BERNI, FRANCESCO BHILS
BERNICIA BHIMA
BERNICIAN SERIES BHIWANI
BERNINI, GIOVANNI LORENZO BHOPAL
BERNIS, FRANCOIS PIERRE DE BHOPAWAR
BERNKASTEL BHOR
BERNOULLI BHUJ
BERNSTEIN, AARON BHUTAN
BERNSTORFF, ANDREAS PETER BIANCHINI, FRANCESCO
BERNSTORFF, CHRISTIAN GUNTHER BIARRITZ
BERNSTORFF, JOHANN HARTWIG ERNST BIAS (Sage of Greece)
BEROSSUS BIAS (something oblique)
BERRY, CHARLES ALBERT BIBACULUS, MARCUS FURIUS
BERRY, CHARLES FERDINAND BIBER, HEINRICH JOHANN FRANZ VON
BERRY, JOHN BIBERACH
BERRY BIBIRINE
BENT, JAMES THEODORE (1852-1897), English traveller, was the son of
James Bent of Baildon House, near Leeds, Yorkshire, where he was born on
the 30th of March 1852. He was educated at Repton school and Wadham
College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1875. In 1877 he married Mabel,
daughter of R.W. Hall-Dare of Newtownbarry, Co. Wexford, and she became
his companion in all his travels. He went abroad every year and became
thoroughly acquainted with Italy and Greece. In 1879 he published a book
on the republic of San Marino, entitled _A Freak of Freedom_, and was
made a citizen of San Marino; in the following year appeared _Genoa: How
the Republic Rose and Fell_, and in 1881 a _Life of Giuseppe Garibaldi_.
He spent considerable time in the Aegean archipelago, of which he wrote
in _The Cyclades: or Life among the Insular Greeks_ (1885). From this
period Bent devoted himself particularly to archaeological research. The
years 1885-1888 were given up to investigations in Asia Minor, his
discoveries and conclusions being communicated to the _Journal of
Hellenic Studies_ and other magazines and reviews. In 1889 he undertook
excavations in the Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, and found
evidence that they had been a primitive home of the Phoenician race.
After an expedition in 1890 to Cilicia Trachea, where he obtained a
valuable collection of inscriptions, Bent spent a year in South Africa,
with the object, by investigation of some of the ruins in Mashonaland,
of throwing light on the vexed question of their origin and on the early
history of East Africa. He made the first detailed examination of the
Great Zimbabwe. Bent described his work in _The Ruined Cities of
Mashonaland_ (1892). In 1893 he investigated the ruins of Axum and other
places in the north of Abyssinia, partially made known before by the
researches of Henry Salt and others, and _The Sacred City of the
Ethiopians_ (1893) gave an account of this expedition. Bent now visited
at considerable risk the almost unknown Hadramut country (1893-1894),
and during this and later journeys in southern Arabia he studied the
ancient history of the country, its physical features and actual
condition. On the Dhafar coast in 1894-1895 he visited ruins which he
identified with the Abyssapolis of the frankincense merchants. In
1895-1896 he examined part of the African coast of the Red Sea, finding
there the ruins of a very ancient gold-mine and traces of what he
considered Sabean influence. While on another journey in South Arabia
(1896-1897), Bent was seized with malarial fever, and died in London on
the 5th of May 1897, a few days after his return. Mrs Bent, who had
contributed by her skill as a photographer and in other ways to the
success of her husband's journeys, published in 1900 _Southern Arabia,
Soudan and Sakotra_, in which were given the results of their last
expedition into that region. The conclusions at which Bent arrived as to
the Semitic origin of the ruins in Mashonaland have not been accepted by
archaeologists, but the value of his pioneer work is undeniable (see
ZIMBABWE).
BENT. 1. (From "to bend"), primarily the result of bending; hence any
inclination from the straight, as in curved objects like a hook or a
bow; this survives in the modern phrase "to follow one's own bent," i.e.
to pursue a certain course in a direction deviating from the normal, as
also in such phrases as Chaucer's "Downward on a hill under a bent,"
indicating a hollow or declivity in the general configuration of the
land. From the bending of a bow comes the idea of tension, as in Hamlet,
"they fool me to the top of my bent," i.e. to the utmost of my capacity.
2. (From the O. Eng. _beonet_, a coarse, rushy grass growing in wet
places; cf. the Ger. _Binse_, a reed), the name ("bent" or "bennet")
popularly applied to several kinds of grass and surviving in the form
"bent-grass."
BENTHAM, GEORGE (1800-1884), English botanist, was born at Stoke near
Portsmouth on the 22nd of September 1800. His father, Sir Samuel Bentham
(1757-1831), was the only brother of Jeremy Bentham, the publicist, and
of scarcely inferior ability though in a different direction. Devoting
himself in early life to the study of naval architecture, Sir Samuel
went to Russia to visit the naval establishments in the Baltic and Black
Seas. He was induced to enter the service of the empress Catherine II.,
built a flotilla of gunboats and defeated the Turkish fleet. For this he
was made, in addition to other honours, colonel of a cavalry regiment.
On the death of the empress he returned to England to be employed by the
admiralty, and was sent (1805-1807) again to Russia to superintend the
building of some ships for the British navy. He attained the rank, under
the admiralty, of inspector-general of naval works. He introduced a
multitude of improvements in naval organization, and it was largely
through his recommendation that M.I. Brunel's block-making machinery was
installed at Portsmouth.
George Bentham had neither a school nor a college education, but early
acquired the power of giving sustained and concentrated attention to any
subject that occupied him--one essential condition of the success he
attained as perhaps the greatest systematic botanist of the 19th
century. Another was his remarkable linguistic aptitude. At the age of
six to seven he could converse in French, German and Russian, and he
learnt Swedish during a short residence in Sweden when little older. At
the close of the war with France, the Benthams made a long tour through
that country, staying two years at Montauban, where Bentham studied
Hebrew and mathematics in the Protestant Theological School. They
eventually settled in the neighbourhood of Montpellier where Sir Samuel
purchased a large estate.
The mode in which George Bentham was attracted to the botanical studies
which became the occupation of his life is noteworthy; it was through
the applicability to them of the logical methods which he had imbibed
from his uncle's writings, and not from any special attraction to
natural history pursuits. While studying at Angouleme a copy of A.P. de
Candolle's _Flore francaise_ fell into his hands and he was struck with
the analytical tables for identifying plants. He immediately proceeded
to test their use on the first that presented itself. The result was
successful and he continued to apply it to every plant he came across. A
visit to London in 1823 brought him into contact with the brilliant
circle of English botanists. In 1826, at the pressing invitation of his
uncle, he agreed to act as his secretary, at the same time entering at
Lincoln's Inn and reading for the bar. He was called in due time and in
1832 held his first and last brief. The same year Jeremy Bentham died,
leaving his property to his nephew. His father's inheritance had fallen
to him the previous year. He was now in a position of modest
independence, and able to pursue undistractedly his favourite studies.
For a time these were divided between botany, jurisprudence and logic,
in addition to editing his father's professional papers. Bentham's first
publication was his _Catalogue des plantes indigenes des Pyrenees et du
Bas Languedoc_ (Paris, 1826), the result of a careful exploration of the
Pyrenees in company with G.A. Walker Arnott (1799-1868), afterwards
professor of botany in the university of Glasgow. It is interesting to
notice that in it Bentham adopted the principle from which he never
deviated, of citing nothing at second-hand. This was followed by
articles on various legal subjects: on codification, in which he
disagreed with his uncle, on the laws affecting larceny and on the law
of real property. But the most remarkable production of this period was
the _Outline of a New System of Logic, with a Critical Examination of Dr
Whately's Elements of Logic_ (1827). In this the principle of the
quantification of the predicate was first explicitly stated. This
Stanley Jevons declared to be "undoubtedly the most fruitful discovery
made in abstract logical science since the time of Aristotle." Before
sixty copies had been sold the publisher became bankrupt and the stock
went for wastepaper. The book passed into oblivion, and it was not till
1873 that Bentham's claims to priority were finally vindicated against
those of Sir William Hamilton by Herbert Spencer. In 1836 he published
his _Labiatarum genera et species_. In preparing this work he visited,
between 1830-1834, every European herbarium, several more than once. The
following winter was passed in Vienna, where he produced his
_Commentationes de Leguminosarum generibus_, published in the annals of
the Vienna Museum. In 1842 he removed to Pontrilas in Herefordshire. His
chief occupation for some succeeding years was his contributions to the
_Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis_, which was being
carried on by his friend, A.P. deCandolle. In all these dealt with some
4730 species.
In 1854 he found the maintenance of a herbarium and library too great a
tax on his means. He therefore offered them to the government on the
understanding that they should form the foundation of such necessary
aids to research in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. At the same time
he contemplated the abandonment of botanical work. Fortunately, he
yielded to the persuasion of Sir William Hooker, John Lindley and other
scientific friends. In 1855 he took up his residence in London, and
worked at Kew for five days a week, with a brief summer holiday, from
this time onwards till the end of his life. As his friend Asa Gray
wrote: "With such methodical habits, with freedom from professional or
administrative functions, which consume the time of most botanists, with
steady devotion to his chosen work, and with nearly all authentic
material and needful appliances at hand or within reach, it is not so
surprising that he should have undertaken and have so well accomplished
such a vast amount of work, and he has the crowning merit and happy
fortune of having completed all that he undertook." The government, in
1857, sanctioned a scheme for the preparation of a series of Floras or
descriptions in the English language of the indigenous plants of British
colonies and possessions. Bentham began with the _Flora Hongkongensis_
in 1861, which was the first comprehensive work on any part of the
little-known flora of China. This was followed by the _Flora
Australiensis_, in seven volumes (1863-1878), the first flora of any
large continental area that had ever been finished. His greatest work
was the _Genera Plantarum_, begun in 1862, and concluded in 1883 in
collaboration with Sir Joseph Hooker, "the greater portion being," as
Sir Joseph Hooker tells us, "the product of Bentham's indefatigable
industry." As age gradually impaired his bodily powers, he seemed at
last only to live for the completion of this monumental work.
When the last revise of the last sheet was returned to the printer, the
stimulus was withdrawn, and his powers seemed suddenly to fail him. He
began a brief autobiography, but the pen with which he had written his
two greatest works broke in his hand in the middle of a page. He
accepted the omen, laid aside the unfinished manuscript and patiently
awaited the not distant end. He died on the both of September 1884,
within a fortnight of his 84th birthday.
The scientific world received the _Genera Plantarum_ with as unanimous
an assent as was accorded to the _Species Plantarum_ of Linnaeus.
Bentham possessed, as Professor Daniel Oliver remarked, "an insight of
so special a character as to deserve the name of genius, into the
relative value of characters for practical systematic work, and as a
consequence of this, a sure sifting of essentials from non-essentials in
each respective grade." His preparation for his crowning work had been
practically lifelong. There are few parts of the world upon the botany
of which he did not touch. In the sequence and arrangement of the great
families of flowering plants, different views from those of Bentham may
be adopted. But Bentham paved the way by an intimate and exact statement
of the structural facts and their accurate relationship, which is not
likely to be improved. In method and style, in descriptive work, Bentham
was a supreme master. This, to quote Professor Oliver again, is
"manifest not only in its terseness, aptness and precision, but
especially in the judicious selection of diagnostic marks, and in the
instinctive estimate of probable range in variation, which long
experience and innate genius for such work could alone inspire."
(W. T. T.-D.)
BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748-1832), English philosopher and jurist, was born on
the 15th of February 1748 in Red Lion Street, Houndsditch, London, in
which neighbourhood his grandfather and father successively carried on
business as attorneys. His father, who was a wealthy man and possessed
at any rate a smattering of Greek, Latin and French, was thought to have
demeaned himself by marrying the daughter of an Andover tradesman, who
afterwards retired to a country house near Reading, where young Jeremy
spent many happy days. The boy's talents justified the ambitious hopes
which his parents entertained of his future. When three years old he
read eagerly such works as Rapin's _History_ and began the study of
Latin. A year or two later he learnt to play the violin and to speak
French. At Westminster school he obtained a reputation for Greek and
Latin verse writing; and he was only thirteen when he was matriculated
at Queen's College, Oxford, where his most important acquisition seems
to have been a thorough acquaintance with Sanderson's logic. He became a
B.A. in 1763, and in the same year entered at Lincoln's Inn, and took
his seat as a student in the queen's bench, where he listened with
rapture to the judgments of Lord Mansfield. He managed also to hear
Blackstone's lectures at Oxford, but says that he immediately detected
the fallacies which underlay the rounded periods of the future judge.
Bentham's family connexions would naturally have given him a fair start
at the bar, but this was not the career for which he was preparing
himself. He spent his time in making chemical experiments and in
speculating upon legal abuses, rather than in reading Coke upon
Littleton and the Reports. On being called to the bar he "found a cause
or two at nurse for him, which he did his best to put to death," to the
bitter disappointment of his father, who had confidently looked forward
to seeing him upon the woolsack. The first fruits of Bentham's studies,
the _Fragment on Government_, appeared in 1776. This masterly attack
upon Blackstone's praises of the English constitution was variously
attributed to Lord Mansfield, Lord Camden and Lord Ashburton. One
important result of its publication was that, in 1781, Lord Shelburne
(afterwards first marquess of Lansdowne) called upon its author in his
chambers at Lincoln's Inn. Henceforth Bentham was a frequent guest at
Bowood, where he saw the best society and where he met Miss Caroline Fox
(daughter of the second Lord Holland), to whom he afterwards made a
proposal of marriage. In 1785 Bentham started, by way of Italy and
Constantinople, on a visit to his brother, Samuel Bentham, a naval
engineer, holding the rank of colonel in the Russian service; and it was
in Russia that he wrote his _Defence of Usury_. Disappointed after his
return to England in 1788 in the hope which he had entertained, through
a misapprehension of something said by Lord Lansdowne, of taking a
personal part in the legislation of his country, he settled down to the
yet higher task of discovering and teaching the principles upon which
all sound legislation must proceed. The great work, upon which he had
been engaged for many years, the _Principles of Morals and
Legislation_, was published in 1789. His fame spread widely and rapidly.
He was made a French citizen in 1792; and his advice was respectfully
received in most of the states of Europe and America, with many of the
leading men of which he maintained an active correspondence. In 1817 he
became a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. His ambition was to be allowed to
prepare a code of laws for his own or some foreign country. During
nearly a quarter of a century he was engaged in negotiations with the
government for the erection of a "Panopticon," for the central
inspection of convicts; a plan suggested to him by a building designed
by his brother Samuel, for the better supervision of his Russian
shipwrights. This scheme, which it was alleged would render
transportation unnecessary, was eventually abandoned, and Bentham
received in 1813, in pursuance of an act of parliament, L23,000 by way
of compensation. It was at a later period of his life that he propounded
schemes for cutting canals through the isthmus of Suez and the isthmus
of Panama. In 1823 he established the _Westminster Review_. Emboldened
perhaps by the windfall of 1813, Bentham in the following year took a
lease of Ford Abbey, a fine mansion with a deer-park, in Dorsetshire;
but in 1818 returned to the house in Queen's Square Place which he had
occupied since the death of his father in 1792. It was there that he
died on the 6th of June 1832 in his eighty-fifth year. In accordance
with his directions, his body was dissected in the presence of his
friends, and the skeleton is still preserved in University College,
London.
Bentham's life was a happy one of its kind. His constitution, weakly in
childhood, strengthened with advancing years so as to allow him to get
through an incredible amount of sedentary labour, while he retained to
the last the fresh and cheerful temperament of a boy. An ample inherited
fortune permitted him to pursue his studies undistracted by the
necessity for earning a livelihood, and to maximize the results of his
time and labour by the employment of amanuenses and secretaries. He was
able to gather around him a group of congenial friends and pupils, such
as the Mills, the Austins and Bowring, with whom he could discuss the
problems upon which he was engaged, and by whom several of his books
were practically rewritten from the mass of rough though orderly
memoranda which the master had himself prepared. Thus, for instance, was
the _Rationale of Judicial Evidence_ written out by J.S. Mill and the
_Book of Fallacies_ by Bingham. The services which Dumont rendered in
recasting as well as translating the works of Bentham were still more
important.
The popular notion that Bentham was a morose visionary is far removed
from fact. It is true that he looked upon general society as a waste of
time and that he disliked poetry as "misrepresentation"; but he
intensely enjoyed conversation, gave good dinners and delighted in
music, in country sights and in making others happy. These features of
Bentham's character are illustrated in the graphic account given by the
American minister, Richard Rush, of an evening spent at his London house
in the summer of the year 1818. "If Mr Bentham's character is peculiar,"
he says, "so is his place of residence. It was a kind of blind-alley,
the end of which widened into a small, neat courtyard. There by itself
stands Mr Bentham's house. Shrubbery graced its area and flowers its
window-sills. It was like an oasis in the desert. Its name is the
Hermitage. Mr Bentham received me with the simplicity of a philosopher.
I should have taken him for seventy or upwards. Everything inside the
house was orderly. The furniture seemed to have been unmoved since the
days of his fathers, for I learned that it was a patrimony. A parlour,
library and dining-room made up the suite of apartments. In each was a
piano, the eccentric master of the whole being fond of music as the
recreation of his literary hours. It is a unique, romantic-like
homestead. Walking with him into the garden, I found it dark with the
shade of ancient trees. They formed a barrier against all intrusion. The
company was small but choice. Mr Brougham; Sir Samuel Romilly; Mr Mill,
author of the well-known work on India; M. Dumont, the learned Genevan,
once the associate of Mirabeau, were all who sat down to table. Mr
Bentham did not talk much. He had a benevolence of manner suited to the
philanthropy of his mind. He seemed to be thinking only of the
convenience and pleasure of his guests, not as a rule of artificial
breeding as from Chesterfield or Madame Genlis, but from innate feeling.
Bold as are his opinions in his works, here he was wholly unobtrusive of
theories that might not have commended the assent of all present. When
he did converse it was in simple language, a contrast to his later
writings, where an involved style and the use of new or universal words
are drawbacks upon the speculations of a genius original and profound,
but with the faults of solitude. Yet some of his earlier productions are
distinguished by classical terseness."--(_Residence at the Court of
London_, p. 286.) Bentham's love of flowers and music, of green foliage
and shaded walks, comes clearly out in this pleasant picture of his home
life and social surroundings.
Whether or no he can be said to have founded a school, his doctrines
have become so far part of the common thought of the time, that there is
hardly an educated man who does not accept as too clear for argument
truths which were invisible till Bentham pointed them out. His
sensitively honourable nature, which in early life had caused him to
shrink from asserting his belief in Thirty-nine articles of faith which
he had not examined, was shocked by the enormous abuses which confronted
him on commencing the study of the law. He rebelled at hearing the
system under which they flourished described as the perfection of human
reason. But he was no merely destructive critic. He was determined to
find a solid foundation for both morality and law, and to raise upon it
an edifice, no stone of which should be laid except in accordance with
the deductions of the severest logic. This foundation is "the greatest
happiness of the greatest number," a formula adopted from Priestly or
perhaps first from Beccaria. The phrase may, however, be found in
writers of an earlier date than these, e.g. in Hutcheson's _Enquiry_,
published in 1725. The pursuit of such happiness is taught by the
"utilitarian" philosophy, an expression used by Bentham himself in 1802,
and therefore not invented by J.S. Mill, as he supposed, in 1823. In
order to ascertain what modes of action are most conducive to the end in
view, and what motives are best fitted to produce them, Bentham was led
to construct marvellously exhaustive, though somewhat mechanical, tables
of motives. With all their elaboration, these tables are, however,
defective, as omitting some of the highest and most influential springs
of action. But most of Bentham's conclusions may be accepted without any
formal profession of the utilitarian theory of morals. They are, indeed,
merely the application of a rigorous common sense to the facts of
society. That the proximate ends at which Bentham aimed are desirable
hardly any one would deny, though the feasibility of the means by which
he proposes to attain them may often be questioned, and much of the new
nomenclature in which he thought fit to clothe his doctrines may be
rejected as unnecessary. To be judged fairly, Bentham must be judged as
a teacher of the principles of legislation. With the principles of
private morals he really deals only so far as is necessary to enable the
reader to appreciate the impulses which have to be controlled by law.
As a teacher of legislation he inquires of all institutions whether
their utility justifies their existence. If not, he is prepared to
suggest a new form of institution by which the needful service may be
rendered. While thus engaged no topic is too large for his mental grasp,
none too small for his notice; and, what is still rarer, every topic is
seen in its due relation to the rest. English institutions had never
before been thus comprehensively and dispassionately surveyed. Such
improvements as had been necessitated were mere makeshifts, often made
by stealth. The rude symmetry of the feudal system had been long ago
destroyed by partial and unskilful adaptations to modern commercial
life, effected at various dates and in accordance with various theories.
The time had come for deliberate reconstruction, for inquiring whether
the existence of many admitted evils was, as it was said to be,
unavoidable; for proving that the needs of society may be classified and
provided for by contrivances which shall not clash with one another
because all shall be parts of a consistent whole. This task Bentham
undertook, and he brought to it a mind absolutely free from professional
or class feeling, or any other species of prejudice. He mapped out the
whole subject, dividing and subdividing it in accordance with the
principle of "dichotomy." Having reached his ultimate subdivisions he
subjects each to the most thorough and ingenious discussion. His earlier
writings exhibit a lively and easy style, which gives place in his later
treatises to sentences which are awkward from their effort after
unattainable accuracy, and from the newly-invented technical
nomenclature in which they are expressed. Many of Bentham's phrases,
such as "international," "utilitarian," "codification," are valuable
additions to our language; but the majority of them, especially those of
Greek derivation, have taken no root in it. His neology is one among
many instances of his contempt for the past and his wish to be clear of
all association with it. His was, indeed, a typically logical, as
opposed to a historical, mind. For the history of institutions which,
thanks largely to the writings of Sir Henry Maine, has become a new and
interesting branch of science, Bentham cared nothing. Had he possessed
such a knowledge of Roman law as is now not uncommon in England, he must
doubtless have taken a different view of many subjects. The logical and
historical methods can, however, seldom be combined without confusion;
and it is perhaps fortunate that Bentham devoted his long life to
showing how much may be done by pursuing the former method exclusively.
His writings have been and remain a storehouse of instruction for
statesmen, an armoury for legal reformers. "Pille par tout le monde," as
Talleyrand said of him, "il est toujours riche." To trace the results of
his teaching in England alone would be to write a history of the
legislation of half a century. Upon the whole administrative machinery
of government, upon criminal law and upon procedure, both criminal and
civil, his influence has been most salutary; and the great legal
revolution which in 1873 purported to accomplish the fusion of law and
equity is not obscurely traceable to the same source. Those of Bentham's
suggestions which have hitherto been carried out have affected the
matter or contents of the law. The hopes which have been from time to
time entertained, that his suggestions for the improvement of its form
and expression were about to receive the attention which they deserved,
have hitherto been disappointed. The services rendered by Bentham to the
world would not, however, be exhausted even by the practical adoption of
every one of his recommendations. There are no limits to the good
results of his introduction of a true method of reasoning into the moral
and political sciences.
Bentham's _Works_, together with an Introduction by J. Hill Burton,
selections from his correspondence and a biography, were published by
Dr Bowring, in eleven closely printed volumes (1838-1843). This
edition does not include the _Deontology_, which, much rewritten, had
been published by Bowring in 1834. Translations of the _Works_ or of
separate treatises have appeared in most European languages. Large
masses of Bentham's MSS., mostly unpublished, are preserved at
University College, London (see T. Whittaker's _Report_, 1892, on
these MSS., as newly catalogued and reclassified by him in 155
parcels); also in the British Museum (see E. Nys, _Etudes de droit
international et de droit politique_, 1901, pp. 291-333). See farther
on the life and writings of Bentham: J.H. Burton, _Benthamiana_
(1843); R. von Mohl, _Geschichte und Literatur der
Staatswissenschaften_, bk. iii. (1858), pp. 595-635; R.K. Wilson,
_History of Modern English Law_ (1875), pp. 133-170; J.S. Mill,
_Dissertations_ (1859), vol. i. pp. 330-392; L. Stephen, _The English
Utilitarians_ (1900), vol. i.; _A Fragment on Government_, edited by
F.C. Montague (1891); _The Law Quarterly Review_ (1895), two articles
on Bentham's influence in Spain; A.V. Dicey, _Law and Opinion in
England_ (1905), pp. 125-209; C.M. Atkinson, _Jeremy Bentham_ (1905).
(T. E. H.)
BENTINCK, LORD WILLIAM (1774-1839), governor-general of India, was the
second son of the 3rd duke of Portland and was born on the 14th of
September 1774. He entered the army, rose to the rank of
lieutenant-colonel and was present at Marengo. In 1803 he was nominated
governor of Madras, where he quarrelled with the chief justice, Sir
Henry Gwillim, and several members of his council. The sepoy mutiny at
Vellore in 1807 led to his recall. His name was considered at this time
for the post of governor-general, but Lord Minto was selected instead;
and it was not until twenty years later that he succeeded Lord Amherst
in that office. His governor-generalship (1827-1835) was notable for
many reforms, chief among which were the suppression of the Thugs
(q.v.), the abolition of suttee, and the making of the English language
the basis of education in India. It was on this last subject that Lord
Macaulay's famous minute was written. Lord William's administration was
essentially peaceful, but progressive and successful. He died at Paris
on the 17th of June 1839.
See Demetrius C. Boulger, _Lord William Bentinck_, in the "Rulers of
India" series (1892).
BENTINCK, LORD WILLIAM GEORGE FREDERICK CAVENDISH, better known as LORD
GEORGE BENTINCK (1802-1848), British politician, was the second
surviving son of the fourth duke of Portland, by Henrietta, sister of
Viscountess Canning, and was born on the 27th of February 1802. He was
educated at home until he obtained his commission as cornet in the 10th
hussars at the age of seventeen. He practically retired from the army in
1822 and acted for some time as private secretary to his uncle George
Canning. In 1828 he succeeded his uncle Lord William Bentinck as member
for Lynn-Regis, and continued to represent that constituency during the
remaining twenty years of his life. His failures as a speaker in
parliament seem to have discouraged him from the attempt to acquire
reputation as a politician, and till within three years of his death he
was little known out of the sporting world. As one of the leaders on
"the turf," however, he was distinguished by that integrity, judgment
and indomitable determination which, when brought to bear upon weightier
matters, quickly gave him a position of first-rate importance in the
political world. On his first entrance into parliament he belonged to
the moderate Whig party, and voted in favour of Catholic emancipation,
as also for the Reform Bill, though he opposed some of its principal
details. Soon after, however, he joined the ranks of the opposition,
with whom he sided up to the important era of 1846. When, in that year,
Sir Robert Peel openly declared in favour of free trade, the advocates
of the corn-laws, then without a leader, after several ineffectual
attempts at organization, discovered that Lord George Bentinck was the
only man of position and family (for Disraeli's time was not yet come)
around whom the several sections of the opposition could be brought to
rally. His sudden elevation took the public by surprise; but he soon
gave convincing evidence of powers so formidable that the Protectionist
party under his leadership was at once stiffened into real importance.
Towards Peel, in particular, his hostility was uncompromising.
Believing, as he himself expressed it, that that statesman and his
colleagues had "hounded to the death his illustrious relative" Canning,
he combined with his political opposition a degree of personal animosity
that gave additional force to his invective. On entering on his new
position, he at once abandoned his connexion with the turf, disposed of
his magnificent stud and devoted his whole energies to the laborious
duties of a parliamentary leader. Apart from the question of the
corn-laws, however, his politics were decidedly independent. In
opposition to the rest of his party, he supported the bill for removing
the Jewish disabilities, and was favourable to the scheme for the
payment of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland by the landowners. The
result was that on December 23rd, 1847, he wrote a letter resigning the
Protectionist leadership, though he still remained active in politics.
But his positive abilities as a constructive statesman were not to be
tested, for he died suddenly at Welbeck on the 21st of September 1848.
It was to be left to Disraeli to bring the Conservative party into
power, with Protection outside its programme.
See _Lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography_ (1851), by B.
Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield).
BENTIVOGLIO, GIOVANNI (1443-1508), tyrant of Bologna, descended from a
powerful family which exercised great influence in Bologna during the
15th century, was born after the murder of his father, then chief
magistrate of the commune. In 1462 Giovanni contrived to make himself
master of the city, although it was nominally a fief of the church under
a papal legate. He ruled with a stern sway for nearly half a century,
but the brilliance of his court, his encouragement of the fine arts and
his decoration of the city with sumptuous edifices, to some extent
compensated the Bolognese for the loss of their liberty. Cesare Borgia
(q.v.) contemplated the subjugation of Bologna in 1500, when he was
crushing the various despots of Romagna, but Bentivoglio was saved for
the moment by French intervention. In 1502 he took part in the
conspiracy against Cesare, but, when the latter obtained French
assistance, he abandoned his fellow-conspirators and helped Borgia to
overcome them. During the brief pontificate of Pius III., who succeeded
Alexander VI. in 1503, Bentivoglio enjoyed a respite, but the new pope,
Julius II., was determined to reduce all the former papal states to
obedience. Having won Louis XII. of France to his side, he led an army
against Bologna, excommunicated Bentivoglio and forced him to abandon
the city (November 1506). The deposed tyrant took refuge with the
French, whom he trusted more than the pope, and died at Milan in 1508.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--P. Litta, _Le Famiglie celebri Italiane_, vol, iii.
(Milan, 1834); P. Villari, _Machiavelli_ (Eng. trans., London, 1892);
M. Creighton, _History of the Papacy_ (London, 1897); A. von Reumont,
_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, vol. iii. (Berlin, 1868). (L. V.*)
BENTIVOGLIO, GUIDO (1579-1644), Italian cardinal, statesman and
historian, was born at Ferrara in 1579. After studying at Padua, he went
to reside at Rome, and was received with great favour by Pope Clement
VIII., who made him his private chamberlain. The next pope, Paul V.,
created him archbishop of Rhodes in 1607, and appointed him as nuncio to
Flanders and afterwards to France; on his return to Rome in 1621 he was
created cardinal and entrusted by Louis XIII. with the management of
French affairs at the papal court. He became the intimate friend of Pope
Urban VIII., who appointed him to the suburban see of Palestrina in
1691. An able writer and skilful diplomatist, Bentivoglio was marked out
as Urban's successor, but he died suddenly on the 7th of September 1644
at the opening of the conclave. Bentivoglio's principal works
are:--_Della Guerra di Fiandria_ (best edition, Cologne, 1633-1639),
translated into English by Henry, earl of Monmouth (London, 1654);
_Relazioni di G. Bentivoglio in tempo delle sue Nunziature di Fiandria e
di Francia_ (Cologne, 1630); _Lettere diplomatiche di Guido Bentivoglio_
(Brussels, 1631, frequently reprinted, best edition by L. Scarabelli, 2
vols., Turin, 1852). The complete edition of his works was published at
Venice in 1668 in 4to. A selection of his letters has been adopted as a
classic in the Italian schools.
BENTLEY, RICHARD (1662-1742), English scholar and critic, was born at
Oulton near Wakefield, Yorkshire, on the 27th of January 1662. His
grandfather had suffered in person and estate in the royalist cause, and
the family were in consequence in reduced circumstances. Bentley's
mother, the daughter of a stonemason in Oulton, was a woman of excellent
understanding and some education, as she was able to give her son his
first lessons in Latin. From the grammar school of Wakefield Richard
Bentley passed to St John's College, Cambridge, being admitted subsizar
in 1676. He afterwards obtained a scholarship and took the degree of
B.A. in 1680 (M.A. 1683). He never succeeded to a fellowship, being
appointed by his college, before he was twenty-one, headmaster of
Spalding grammar school. In this post he did not remain long, being
selected by Dr Edward Stillingfleet, dean of St Paul's, to be domestic
tutor to his son. This appointment introduced Bentley at once to the
society of the most eminent men of the day, threw open to him the best
private library in England, and brought him into familiar intercourse
with Dean Stillingfleet, a man of sound understanding, who had not
shrunk from exploring some of the more solid and abstruse parts of
ancient learning. The six years which he passed in Stillingfleet's
family were employed, with the restless energy characteristic of the
man, in exhausting the remains of the Greek and Latin writers, and
laying up those stores of knowledge upon which he afterwards drew as
circumstances required.
In 1689 Stillingfleet became bishop of Worcester, and Bentley's pupil
went to reside at Oxford in Wadham College, accompanied by his tutor.
Bentley's introductions and his own merits placed him at once on a
footing of intimacy with the most distinguished scholars in the
university, Dr John Mill, Humphrey Hody, Edward Bernard. Here he
revelled in the MS. treasures of the Bodleian, Corpus and other college
libraries. He projected and occupied himself with collections for vast
literary schemes. Among these are specially mentioned a _corpus_ of the
fragments of the Greek poets and an edition of the Greek lexicographers.
But his first publication was in connexion with a writer of much
inferior note. The Oxford (Sheldonian) press was about to bring out an
edition (the _editio princeps_) from the unique MS. in the Bodleian of
the Greek _Chronicle_ (a universal history down to A.D. 560) of John of
Antioch (date uncertain, between 600 and 1000), called John Malalas or
"John the Rhetor"; and the editor, Dr John Mill, principal of St Edmund
Hall, had requested Bentley to look through the sheets and make any
remarks on the text. This originated Bentley's _Epistola ad Millium_,
which occupies less than one hundred pages at the end of the Oxford
_Malalas_ (1691). This short tractate at once placed Bentley at the head
of all living English scholars. The ease with which, by a stroke of the
pen, he restores passages which had been left in hopeless corruption by
the editors of the _Chronicle_, the certainty of the emendation and the
command over the relevant material, are in a style totally different
from the careful and laborious learning of Hody, Mill or E. Chilmead. To
the small circle of classical students (lacking the great critical
dictionaries of modern times) it was at once apparent that there had
arisen in England a critic whose attainments were not to be measured by
the ordinary academical standard, but whom these few pages had sufficed
to place by the side of the great Grecians of a former age.
Unfortunately this mastery over critical science was accompanied by a
tone of self-assertion and presumptuous confidence which not only
checked admiration, but was calculated to rouse enmity. Dr Monk, indeed,
Bentley's biographer, charged him (in his first edition, 1830) with an
indecorum of which he was not guilty. "In one place," writes Dr Monk,
"he accosts Dr Mill as [Greek: o Ioannidion] (Johnny), an indecorum
which neither the familiarity of friendship, nor the licence of a dead
language, can justify towards the dignified head of a house." But the
object of Bentley's apostrophe was not his correspondent Dr Mill, but
his author John Malalas, whom in another place he playfully appeals to
as "Syrisce." From this publication, however, dates the origin of those
mixed feelings of admiration and repugnance which Bentley throughout his
career continued to excite among his contemporaries.
In 1690 Bentley had taken deacon's orders in the Church. In 1692 he was
nominated first Boyle lecturer, a nomination which was repeated in 1694.
He was offered the appointment a third time in 1695 but declined it,
being by that time involved in too many other undertakings. In the first
series of lectures ("A Confutation of Atheism") he endeavours to present
the Newtonian physics in a popular form, and to frame them (especially
in opposition to Hobbes) into a proof of the existence of an intelligent
Creator. He had some correspondence with Newton, then living in Trinity
College, on the subject. The second series, preached in 1694, has not
been published and is believed to be lost. Andrew Kippis, the editor of
the _Biographia Britannica_, mentions MS. copies of them as in
existence. Scarcely was Bentley in priest's orders before he was
preferred to a prebendal stall in Worcester cathedral. In 1693 the
keepership of the royal library becoming vacant, great efforts were made
by his friends to obtain the place for Bentley, but through court
interest the post was given to Mr Thynne. An arrangement, however, was
made, by which the new librarian resigned in favour of Bentley, on
condition that he received an annuity of L130 for life out of the
salary, which only amounted to L200. To these preferments were added in
1695 a royal chaplaincy and the living of Hartlebury. In the same year
Bentley was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1696 proceeded
to the degree of D.D. The recognition of continental scholars came in
the shape of a dedication, by Graevius, prefixed to a dissertation of
Albert Rubens, _De Vita Flavii Mallii Theodori_, published at Utrecht in
1694.
While these distinctions were being accumulated upon Bentley, his energy
was making itself felt in many and various directions. He had official
apartments in St James's Palace, and his first care was the royal
library. He made great efforts to retrieve this collection from the
dilapidated condition into which it had been allowed to fall. He
employed the mediation of the earl of Marlborough to beg the grant of
some additional rooms in the palace for the books. The rooms were
granted, but Marlborough characteristically kept them for himself.
Bentley enforced the law against the publishers, and thus added to the
library nearly 1000 volumes which they had neglected to deliver. He was
commissioned by the university of Cambridge to obtain Greek and Latin
founts for their classical books, and accordingly he had cast in Holland
those beautiful types which appear in the Cambridge books of that date.
He assisted Evelyn in his _Numismata_. All Bentley's literary
appearances at this time were of this accidental character. We do not
find him settling down to the steady execution of any of the great
projects with which he had started. He designed, indeed, in 1694 an
edition of Philostratus, but readily abandoned it to G. Olearius,
(Ohlschlager), "to the joy," says F.A. Wolf, "of Olearius and of no one
else." He supplied Graevius with collations of Cicero, and Joshua Barnes
with a warning as to the spuriousness of the _Epistles of Euripides_,
which was thrown away upon that blunderer, who printed the epistles and
declared that no one could doubt their genuineness but a man _perfrictae
frontis aut judicii imminuti_. Bentley supplied to Graevius's
_Callimachus_ a masterly collection of the fragments with notes,
published at Utrecht in 1697.
The _Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris_, the work on which
Bentley's fame in great part rests, originated in the same casual way.
William Wotton, being about to bring out in 1697 a second edition of his
book on _Ancient and Modern Learning_, claimed of Bentley the fulfilment
of an old promise to write a paper exposing the spuriousness of the
_Epistles of Phalaris_. This paper was resented as an insult by the
Christ Church editor of Phalaris, Charles Boyle, afterwards earl of
Orrery, who in getting the MS. in the royal library collated for his
edition (1695) had had a little quarrel with Bentley. Assisted by his
college friends, particularly Atterbury, Boyle wrote a reply, "a
tissue," says Dr Alexander Dyce (in his edition of Bentley's Works,
1836-1838), "of superficial learning, ingenious sophistry, dexterous
malice and happy raillery." The reply was hailed by the public as
crushing and went immediately into a second edition. It was incumbent on
Bentley to rejoin. This he did (1699) in what Porson styles "that
immortal dissertation," to which no answer was or could be given,
although the truth of its conclusions was not immediately recognized.
(See PHALARIS.)
In the year 1700 Bentley received that main preferment which, says De
Quincey, "was at once his reward and his scourge for the rest of his
life." The six commissioners of ecclesiastical patronage unanimously
recommended Bentley to the crown for the mastership of Trinity College,
Cambridge. This college, the most splendid foundation in the university
of Cambridge, and in the scientific and literary reputation of its
fellows the most eminent society in either university, had in 1700
greatly fallen from its high estate. It was not that it was more
degraded than the other colleges, but its former lustre made the abuse
of endowments in its case more conspicuous. The eclipse had taken place
during the reaction which followed 1660, and was owing to causes which
were not peculiar to Trinity, but which influenced the nation at large.
The names of John Pearson and Isaac Barrow, and, greater than either,
that of Newton, adorn the college annals of this period. But these were
quite exceptional men. They had not inspired the rank and file of
fellows of Trinity with any of their own love for learning or science.
Indolent and easy-going clerics, without duties, without a pursuit or
any consciousness of the obligation of endowments, they haunted the
college for the pleasant life and the good things they found there,
creating sinecure offices in each other's favour, jobbing the
scholarships and making the audits mutually pleasant. Any excuse served
for a banquet at the cost of "the house," and the celibacy imposed by
the statutes was made as tolerable as the decorum of a respectable
position permitted. To such a society Bentley came, obnoxious as a St
John's man and an intruder, unwelcome as a man of learning whose
interests lay outside the walls of the college. Bentley replied to their
concealed dislike with open contempt, and proceeded to ride roughshod
over their little arrangements. He inaugurated many beneficial reforms
in college usages and discipline, executed extensive improvements in the
buildings, and generally used his eminent station for the promotion of
the interests of learning both in the college and in the university. But
this energy was accompanied by a domineering temper, an overweening
contempt for the feelings and even for the rights of others, and an
unscrupulous use of means when a good end could be obtained. Bentley, at
the summit of classical learning, disdained to associate with men whom
he regarded as illiterate priests. He treated them with contumely, while
he was diverting their income to public purposes. The continued drain
upon their purses--on one occasion the whole dividend of the year was
absorbed by the rebuilding of the chapel--was the grievance which at
last roused the fellows to make a resolute stand. After ten years of
stubborn but ineffectual resistance within the college, they had
recourse in 1710 to the last remedy--an appeal to the visitor, the
bishop of Ely (Dr Moore). Their petition is an ill-drawn invective, full
of general complaints and not alleging any special delinquency.
Bentley's reply (_The Present State of Trinity College, &c._, 1710) is
in his most crushing style. The fellows amended their petition and put
in a fresh charge, in which they articled fifty-four separate breaches
of the statutes as having been committed by the master. Bentley, called
upon to answer, demurred to the bishop of Ely's jurisdiction, alleging
that the crown was visitor. He backed his application by a dedication of
his _Horace_ to the lord treasurer (Harley). The crown lawyers decided
the point against him; the case was heard (1714) and a sentence of
ejection from the mastership ordered to be drawn up, but before it was
executed the bishop of Ely died and the process lapsed. The feud,
however, still went on in various forms. In 1718 Bentley was deprived by
the university of his degrees, as a punishment for failing to appear in
the vice-chancellor's court in a civil suit; and it was not till 1724
that the law compelled the university to restore them. In 1733 he was
again brought to trial before the bishop of Ely (Dr Greene) by the
fellows of Trinity and was sentenced to deprivation, but the college
statutes required the sentence to be exercised by the vice-master (Dr
Walker), who was Bentley's friend and refused to act. In vain were
attempts made to compel the execution of the sentence, and though the
feud was kept up till 1738 or 1740 (about thirty years in all) Bentley
remained undisturbed.
During the period of his mastership, with the exception of the first two
years, Bentley pursued his studies uninterruptedly, although the results
in the shape of published works seem incommensurable. In 1709 he
contributed a critical appendix to John Davies's edition of Cicero's
_Tusculan Disputations_. In the following year he published his
emendations on the _Plutus_ and _Nubes_ of Aristophanes, and on the
fragments of Menander and Philemon. The last came out under the name of
"Phileleutherus Lipsiensis," which he made use of two years later in his
_Remarks on a late Discourse of Freethinking_, a reply to Anthony
Collins the deist. For this he received the thanks of the university, in
recognition of the service thereby rendered to the church and clergy.
His _Horace_, long contemplated and in the end written in very great
haste and brought out to propitiate public opinion at a critical period
of the Trinity quarrel, appeared in 1711. In the preface he declared his
intention of confining his attention to criticism and correction of the
text, and ignoring exegesis. Some of his 700 or 800 emendations have
been accepted, but the majority of them are now rejected as unnecessary
and prosaic, although the learning and ingenuity shown in their support
are remarkable. In 1716, in a letter to Dr Wake, archbishop of
Canterbury, he announced his design of preparing a critical edition of
the New Testament. During the next four years, assisted by J.J.
Wetstein, an eminent biblical critic, who claimed to have been the first
to suggest the idea to Bentley, he collected materials for the work, and
in 1720 published _Proposals for a New Edition of the Greek Testament_,
with specimens of the manner in which he intended to carry it out. He
proposed, by comparing the text of the Vulgate with that of the oldest
Greek MSS., to restore the Greek text as received by the church at the
time of the council of Nice. A large number of subscribers to the work
was obtained, but it was never completed. His _Terence_ (1726) is more
important than his _Horace_, and it is upon this, next to the
_Phalaris_, that his reputation mainly rests. Its chief value consists
in the novel treatment of the metrical questions and their bearing on
the emendation of the text. To the same year belong the _Fables_ of
Phaedrus and the _Sententiae_ of Publius Syrus. The _Paradise Lost_
(1732), undertaken at the suggestion of Queen Caroline, is generally
regarded as the most unsatisfactory of all his writings. It is marred by
the same rashness in emendation and lack of poetical feeling as his
Horace; but there is less excuse for him in this case, since the English
text could not offer the same field for conjecture. He put forward the
idea that Milton employed both an amanuensis and an editor, who were to
be held responsible for the clerical errors, alterations and
interpolations which Bentley professed to detect. It is uncertain
whether this was a device on the part of Bentley to excuse his own
numerous corrections, or whether he really believed in the existence of
this editor. Of the contemplated edition of Homer nothing was published;
all that remains of it consists of some manuscript and marginal notes in
the possession of Trinity College. Their chief importance lies in the
attempt to restore the metre by the insertion of the lost digamma. Among
his minor works may be mentioned: the _Astronomica_ of Manilius (1739),
for which he had been collecting materials since 1691; a letter on the
Sigean inscription on a marble slab found in the Troad, now in the
British Museum; notes on the _Theriaca_ of Nicander and on Lucan,
published after his death by Cumberland; emendations of Plautus (in his
copies of the editions by Pareus, Camerarius and Gronovius, edited by
Schroder, 1880, and Sonnenschein, 1883). _Bentleii Critica Sacra_
(1862), edited by A.A. Ellis, contains the epistle to the Galatians (and
excerpts), printed from an interleaved folio copy of the Greek and Latin
Vulgate in Trinity College. A collection of his _Opuscula Philologica_
was published at Leipzig in 1781. The edition of his works by Dyce
(1836-1838) is incomplete.
He had married in 1701 Joanna, daughter of Sir John Bernard of Brampton
in Huntingdonshire. Their union lasted forty years. Mrs Bentley died in
1740, leaving a son, Richard, and two daughters, one of whom married in
1728 Mr Denison Cumberland, grandson of Richard Cumberland, bishop of
Peterborough. Their son was Richard Cumberland, the dramatist.
Surrounded by his grandchildren, Dr Bentley experienced the joint
pressure of age and infirmity as lightly as is consistent with the lot
of humanity. He continued to amuse himself with reading; and though
nearly confined to his arm-chair, was able to enjoy the society of his
friends and several rising scholars, J. Markland, John Taylor, his
nephews Richard and Thomas Bentley, with whom he discussed classical
subjects. He was accustomed to say that he should live to be eighty,
adding that a life of that duration was long enough to read everything
worth reading. He fulfilled his own prediction, dying of pleurisy on the
14th of July 1742. Though accused by his enemies of being grasping, he
left not more than L5000 behind him. A few Greek MSS., brought from
Mount Athos, he left to the college library; his books and papers to his
nephew, Richard Bentley. Richard, who was a fellow of Trinity, at his
death in 1786 left the papers to the college library. The books,
containing in many cases valuable manuscript notes, were purchased by
the British Museum.
Of his personal habits some anecdotes are related by his grandson,
Richard Cumberland, in vol. i. of his _Memoirs_ (1807). The hat of
formidable dimensions, which he always wore during reading to shade his
eyes, and his preference of port to claret (which he said "would be port
if it could") are traits embodied in Pope's caricature (_Dunciad_, b.
4), which bears in other respects little resemblance to the original. He
did not take up the habit of smoking till he was seventy. He held the
archdeaconry of Ely with two livings, but never obtained higher
preference in the church. He was offered the (then poor) bishopric of
Bristol but refused it, and being asked what preferment he would
consider worth his acceptance, replied, "That which would leave him no
reason to wish for a removal."
Bentley was the first, perhaps the only, Englishman who can be ranked
with the great heroes of classical learning, although perhaps not a
great classical scholar. Before him there were only John Selden, and, in
a more restricted field, Thomas Gataker and Pearson. But Selden, a man
of stupendous learning, wanted the freshness of original genius and
confident mastery over the whole region of his knowledge. "Bentley
inaugurated a new era of the art of criticism. He opened a new path.
With him criticism attained its majority. Where scholars had hitherto
offered suggestions and conjectures, Bentley, with unlimited control
over the whole material of learning, gave decisions" (Mahly). The modern
German school of philology does ungrudging homage to his genius.
Bentley, says Bunsen, "was the founder of historical philology." And
Jakob Bernays says of his corrections of the _Tristia_, "corruptions
which had hitherto defied every attempt even of the mightiest, were
removed by a touch of the fingers of this British Samson." The English
school of Hellenists, by which the 18th century was distinguished, and
which contains the names of R. Dawes, J. Markland, J. Taylor, J. Toup,
T. Tyrwhitt, Richard Porson, P.P. Dobree, Thomas Kidd and J.H. Monk, was
the creation of Bentley. And even the Dutch school of the same period,
though the outcome of a native tradition, was in no small degree
stimulated and directed by the example of Bentley, whose letters to the
young Hemsterhuis on his edition of Julius Pollux produced so powerful
an effect on him, that he became one of Bentley's most devoted admirers.
Bentley was a source of inspiration to a following generation of
scholars. Himself, he sprang from the earth without forerunners, without
antecedents. Self-taught, he created his own science. It was his
misfortune that there was no contemporary gild of learning in England by
which his power could be measured, and his eccentricities checked. In
the _Phalaris_ controversy his academical adversaries had not sufficient
knowledge to know how absolute their defeat was. Garth's couplet--
"So diamonds take a lustre from their foil,
And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle"--
expressed the belief of the wits or literary world of the time. The
attacks upon him by Pope, John Arbuthnot and others are evidence of
their inability to appreciate his work. To them, textual criticism
seemed mere pedantry and useless labour. It was not only that he had to
live with inferiors, and to waste his energy in a struggle forced upon
him by the necessities of his official position, but the wholesome
stimulus of competition and the encouragement of a sympathetic circle
were wanting. In a university where the instruction of youth or the
religious controversy of the day were the only known occupations,
Bentley was an isolated phenomenon, and we can hardly wonder that he
should have flagged in his literary exertions after his appointment to
the mastership of Trinity. All his vast acquisitions and all his
original views seem to have been obtained before 1700. After this period
he acquired little and made only spasmodic efforts--the _Horace_, the
_Terence_ and the _Milton_. The prolonged mental concentration and
mature meditation, which alone can produce a great work, were wanting to
him.
F.A. Wolf, _Literarische Analekten_, i. (1816); Monk, _Life of
Bentley_ (1830); J. Mahly, _Richard Bentley, eine Biographie_ (1868);
R.C. Jebb, _Bentley_ ("English Men of Letters" series, 1882), where a
list of authorities bearing on Bentley's life and work is given. For
his letters see _Bentlei et doctorum virorum ad eum Epistolae_ (1807);
_The Correspondence of Richard Bentley_, edited by C. Wordsworth
(1842). See also J.E. Sandys, _History of Classical Scholarship_, ii.
401-410 (1908); and the _Bibliography of Bentley_, by A.T. Bartholomew
and J.W. Clark (Cambridge, 1908).
BENTLEY, RICHARD (1794-1871), British publisher, was born in London in
1794. His father owned the _General Evening Post_ in conjunction with
John Nichols, to whom Richard Bentley, on leaving St Paul's school, was
apprenticed to learn the printing trade. With his brother SAMUEL
(1785-1868), an antiquarian of some repute, he set up a printing
establishment, but in 1829 he began business as a publisher in
partnership with Henry Colburn in New Burlington Street. Colburn retired
in 1832 and Bentley continued business on his own account. In 1837 he
began _Bentley's Miscellany_, edited for the first three years of its
existence by Charles Dickens, whose _Oliver Twist_, with Cruikshank's
illustrations, appeared in its pages. Bentley and his son GEORGE
(1828-1895), as Richard Bentley & Son, published works by R.H. Barham,
Theodore Hook, Isaac D'Israeli, Judge Haliburton and others; also the
"Library of Standard Novels" and the "Favourite Novel Library." In the
latter series Mrs Henry Wood's _East Lynne_ appeared. In 1866 the firm
took over the publication of _Temple Bar_, with which _Bentley's
Miscellany_ was afterwards incorporated. Richard Bentley died on the
10th of September 1871. His son, George Bentley, and his grandson,
Richard Bentley, junior, continued the business until it was absorbed
(1898) by Macmillan & Co.
See also _R. Bentley & Son_ (Edinburgh, 1886), a history of the firm
reprinted from _Le Livre_ (October, 1885).
BENTON, THOMAS HART (1782-1858), American statesman, was born at
Hillsborough, Orange county, North Carolina, on the 14th of March 1782.
His father, an Englishman of refinement and scholarship, died in 1790,
leaving the boy under the influence of a very superior mother, from whom
he received lessons in book learning, piety and temperance quite unusual
in the frontier country. His home studies, facilitated by his father's
fine library, were supplemented by a brief stay at the university of
North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in 1799. The family removed, probably in
this year, to a large tract of land which had been acquired by the
father on the outskirts of the Indian country (at Benton Town, now
Leipers Fork) near Franklin, Tennessee. The following years, during
which Benton was at various times school teacher, farmer, lawyer and
politician, were the distinctively formative period of his life. His
intense democracy and many features of his boldly cast personality were
perfectly representative of the border people among whom he lived;
although his education, social standing and force of character placed
him above his fellows. In 1809 he served a term as state senator.
Between 1815 and 1817 he transferred his interests to St Louis,
Missouri, and in 1820 was elected United States senator from the new
state. His senatorial career of thirty years (1821-1851) was one of
extreme prominence. A friendship early formed in Tennessee for Andrew
Jackson was broken in 1813 by an armed fracas between the principals and
their friends, but after the presidential election of 1824 Benton became
a Jacksonian Democrat and Jackson's close friend, and as such was long
the Democratic leader in the Senate, his power being greatest during
Jackson's second term. He continued to be the administration's
right-hand man under Van Buren, but gradually lost influence under Polk,
with whom he finally broke both personally and politically.
The events of Benton's political life are associated primarily with
three things: the second United States Bank, westward expansion and
slavery. In the long struggles over the bank, the deposits and the
"expunging resolution" (i.e. the resolution to expunge from the records
of the Senate the vote of censure of President Jackson for his removal
of the government deposits from the bank), Benton led the Jackson
Democrats. His opposition to a national bank and insistence on the
peculiar virtues of "hard money," whence his sobriquet of "Old Bullion,"
went back to his Tennessee days. In all that concerned the expansion of
the country and the fortunes of the West no public man was more
consistent or more influential than Benton, and none so clear of vision.
Reared on the border, and representing a state long the farthermost
outpost across the Mississippi in the Indian country, he held the
ultra-American views of his section as regarded foreign relations
generally, and the "manifest destiny" of expansion westward especially.
It was quite natural that he should advocate the removal westward of the
Indian tribes, should urge the encouragement of trade with Sante Fe (New
Mexico), and should oppose the abandonment in the Spanish treaty of 1819
of American claims to Texas. He once thought the Rocky Mountains the
proper western limit of the United States (1824), but this view he soon
outgrew. He was the originator of the policy of homestead laws by which
the public lands were used to promote the settlement of the west by
home-seekers. No other man was so early and so long active for
transcontinental railways. But Benton was not a land-grabber, whether in
the interest of slavery or of mere jingoism. In the case of Oregon, for
instance, he was firmly against joint occupation with Great Britain, but
he was always for the boundary of 49 deg. and never joined in the
campaign-jingo cry of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight." It was he who chiefly
aided Polk in withdrawing from that untenable position. He despised
pretexts and intrigues. Both in the case of Oregon and in that of Texas,
though one of the earliest and most insistent of those who favoured
their acquisition, yet in the face of southern and western sentiment he
denounced the sordid and devious intrigues and politics connected with
their acquisition, and kept clear of these. For the same reason he
opposed the Mexican War, though not its prosecution once begun. In the
Texas question slavery was prominent. Toward slavery Benton held a
peculiarly creditable attitude. A southerner, he was a slaveholder; but
he seems to have gradually learned that slavery was a curse to the
South, for in 1844 he declared that he would not introduce it into Texas
lands "where it was never known," and in 1849 proclaimed that his
personal sentiments were "against the institution of slavery." In the
long struggle over slavery in the territories, following 1845, he was
for the extreme demands of neither section; not because he was timorous
or a compromiser,--no man was less of either,--but because he stood
unwaveringly for justice to both sections, never adopting exaggerated
views that must or even could be compromised. The truth is that he was
always a westerner before he was a southerner and a union man before all
things else; he was no whit less national than Webster. Hence his
distrust and finally hatred of Calhoun, dating from the nullification
episode of 1832-1833. As the South under Calhoun's lead became
increasingly sectional and aggressive, Benton increasingly lost sympathy
with her. Though he despised political inaction Abolitionists, and hated
their propaganda as inimical to the Union, he would not therefore close
the national mails to Abolition literature, nor abridge the right of
petition. No statesman was more prescient of the disunion tendencies of
Calhoun's policies, and as early as 1844 he prophetically denounced the
treason to the Union toward which the South was drifting. He would not
drift with her for the sake of slavery, and this was his political
undoing. In 1851 Missouri rejected him in his sixth candidacy for the
Senate, after he had been an autocrat in her politics for thirty years.
In 1852 he was elected to the House of Representatives, but his
opposition to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise caused his defeat in
1854. An unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of Missouri in 1856
ended his political career. He died at Washington on the 10th of April
1858.
Benton's entire career was eminently creditable, and he is, besides, one
of the most picturesque figures in American political history. His
political principles--whether as regarded lobbying, congressional
jobbing, civil service or great issues of legislation and foreign
affairs--were of the highest. He was so independent that he had great
dislike for caucuses, and despised party platforms--although he never
voted any but the Democratic ticket, even when his son-in-law, J.C.
Fremont, was the Republican presidential candidate in 1856; nor would he
accept instructions from the Missouri legislature. His career shows no
truckling to self-interest, and on large issues he outgrew partisanship.
Although palpably inferior to each of his great senatorial colleagues,
Webster, Clay and Calhoun, in some gifts, yet if character, qualities
and career be taken in the whole his were possibly the most creditable
of all. Benton was austere, aggressive and vain; besides, he had a fatal
deficiency of humour. Nevertheless he had great influence, which was a
deserved tribute to his ability and high character. An indefatigable
student, he treated all subjects capably, and especially in questions of
his country's history and the exploration of the West had few
equals--in the latter none. He acted always with uncalculating boldness,
and defended his acts with extraordinary courage and persistence. Benton
wrote a _Thirty Years' View ... of the American Government_ (2 vols.,
1854-1856), characteristic of the author's personality; it is of great
value for the history of his time. He also compiled an _Abridgment of
the Debates of Congress_, 1789-1850 (16 vols., 1857-1861), likewise of
great usefulness; and published a bitter review of the Dred Scott
decision full of extremely valuable historical details--_Historical and
Legal Examination of ... the Dred Scott Case_ (1857). All were written
in the last eight years of his life and mostly in the last three.
The best biography is that by W.M. Meigs, _Life of Thomas Hart Benton_
(Philadelphia and London, 1904). See also Theodore Roosevelt's _Thomas
Hart Benton_ (Boston, 1887), in the "American Statesmen" series, which
admirably brings out Benton's significance as a western man; and
Joseph M. Rogers's _Thomas Hart Benton_ (Philadelphia, 1905) in the
"American Crisis" series.
BENTON HARBOR, a city of Berrien county, Michigan, U.S.A., on the Saint
Joseph river, about 1 m. from Lake Michigan (with which it is connected
by a ship canal), near the S.W. corner of the state, and 1 m. N.E. of St
Joseph. Pop. (1890) 3692; (1900) 6562, of whom 795 were foreign-born;
(1904) 6702; (1910) 9185. It is served by the Pere Marquette, the
Michigan Central, and the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis
railways, by electric railways to St Joseph and Niles, Mich., and South
Bend, Indiana, and for a part of the year by steamboat lines to Chicago
and Milwaukee. One mile south-east of the city are a sanitarium and the
Eastman mineral springs; within the city also there are springs and
bath-houses. Near the city is a communistic religious community, the
Israelite House of David, founded in 1903, the members believe that they
are a part of the 144,000 elect (Revelation, vii, xiv) ultimately to be
redeemed. Benton Harbor has a large trade in fruit (peaches, grapes,
pears, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and apples) and other market
garden produce raised in the vicinity. The city's manufactures include
fruit baskets, preserved fruits, cider, vinegar, pickles, furniture,
lumber and stationers' supplies, particularly material for the
"loose-leaf ledger" system of accounting. Benton Harbor, which was known
as Bronson Harbor until 1865, was incorporated as a village in 1869, was
chartered as a city in 1891, and in 1903 received a new charter.
BENUE, a river of West Africa, the largest and most important affluent
of the Niger (q.v.), which it joins after a course of over 800 m. in a
general east to west direction from its source in the mountains of
Adamawa. Through the Tuburi marshes there is a water connexion between
the Benue (Niger) and Shari (Lake Chad) systems.
BEN VENUE, a mountain in south-west Perthshire, Scotland, 10 m. W. of
Callander. Its principal peaks are 2393 and 2386 ft. high, and, owing to
its position near the south-eastern shore of Loch Katrine, its imposing
contour is one of the most familiar features in the scenery of the
Trossachs, the mountain itself figuring prominently in _The Lady of the
Lake_. On its northern base, close to the lake, Sir Walter Scott placed
the Coir-nan-Uriskin, or "Goblin's Cave." Immediately to the south of
the cave is the dell called Beal(ach)-nam-Bo, or "Cattle Pass," through
which were driven to the refuge of the Trossachs the herds lifted by the
Highland marauders in their excursions to the lands south of Loch
Lomond. The pass, though comparatively unvisited, offers the grandest
scenery in the district.
BENZALDEHYDE (oil of bitter almonds), C6H5CHO, the simplest
representative of the aromatic aldehydes. It was first isolated in 1803
and was the subject of an important investigation by J. v. Liebigin 1837
(_Annalen_, 1837, 22, p. 1). It occurs naturally in the form of the
glucoside amygdalin (C20H27NO11), which is present in bitter almonds,
cherries, peaches and the leaves of the cherry laurel; and is obtained
from this substance by hydrolysis with dilute acids: