Richard Bentley

Richard Bentley (January 27, 1662 – July 14, 1742) was an English theologian, classical scholar and critic.

A bust of Bentley now stands in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge

Quotes

• It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.
  • Monk's Life of Bentley, p. 90.

• “Whatever is, is not,” is the maxim of the anarchist, as often as anything comes across him in the shape of a law which he happens not to like.
  • Declaration of Rights. Compare: "Whatever is, is in its causes just", John Dryden, Œdipus, Act iii. Sc. 1.

• The fortuitous or casual concourse of atoms.
  • Sermons, vii. Works, Vol. iii. p. 147 (1692). Compare: "That fortuitous concourse of atoms", "Review of Sir Robert Peel's Address", Quarterly Review, vol. liii. p. 270 (1835); "In this article a party was described as a fortuitous concourse of atoms,—a phrase supposed to have been used for the first time many years afterwards by Lord John Russell", Croker Papers, vol. ii. p. 54.

• It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.
  • Of Pope's translation of The Iliad — as quoted in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Eleven Volumes by John Hawkins, Vol. IV (1787), The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, "Life of Pope", footnote on p. 126.

Quotes about Bentley

• The mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains
  Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
  • Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1743), Book IV.