unison with my reason, my principle, my inclination, and the duty every man owes to his country, and his posterity.

Thus, my Lord, Heavenly bounty engages mankind, while the commands are so far from being grievous, that at the same time we obey, we promote our own felicity, and joyn the reward to the duty.

As to the exceeding bounty I have now received, and which your Lordship obliges me to reserve my acknowledgements of for a yet unknown benefactor, Pardon me, my Lord, to believe your Lordship's favour to me has at least so much share in the conduct of it, if not in the substance, that I am persuaded I cannot be more oblidged to the donor, than to your Lordship' singular goodness, which tho' I can not deserve, yet I shall allways sensibly reflect on, and improve. And I should be doubly blest, if providence would put it into my hands, to render your Lordship some service suited to the sence I have of your Lordship's extraordinary favour.

And yet I am your Lordship's most humble petitioner, that if possible I may know the originalls of this munificence, sure that hand that can suppose me to merit so much regard, must believe me fitt to be trusted with the knowledge of my benefactor, and uncapable of discovering any part of it, that should be conceal'd; but I submitt this to your Lordship and the persons concern'd. I frankly acknowledge to your Lordship, and to the unknown rewarders of my mean performances, that I do not see the merit they are thus pleas'd to vallue; the most I wish and which I hope I can answer for is, that I shall allwayes preserve the homely despicable title of an honest man. If this will recommend me, your Lordship shall never be asham'd of giving me that title, ncı my enemys be able by fear or reward to make me otherwise.

In all things I justly apprehend your Lordship's disappointment, and that your Lordship will find little else in me worth your notice.

I am,

May it please your Lordship,

Your Lordship's highly obliged,

Most humble and most

obedt servt

DANIEL DE FOE.

CIV.

How perfectly unmoved was the famous Dr. Richard Bentley-how conscious of success, and how thoroughly he despised his adversaries, when about to send to press his final reply in the 'Boyle and Bentley' controversy (the fiercest of the literary contests of the seventeenth century), will be seen in this brief and interesting letter. He is not merely intending to settle the question of the disputed authorship of the Epistles of Phalaris,' but to prove that the collected strength of Christchurch, Oxford, superadded to that of Dr. Atterbury, Dean Swift, and other scholars, was only able to assail him by writing a 'shallow book.'

Dr. Richard Bentley to John Evelyn.

Trinity College, Cambridge: April 21, 1698. Honoured Friend,-I cannot express to you how kindly I receive your Letter; and what a trial of true friendship I esteem it, that, at that distance from me, among the cry of such as are concerned as a Party to run me down, you alone would stand up for me, and expect till you heard alteram partem, as your inscription well expresses it. As for my friends that are here upon the spot, and can ask me questions, they are long ago satisfied that the Book is not so formidable as the authors of it believed it.

1

But I am content, nay desirous, to have it pass for an unanswerable piece; for it will be the more surprising and glorious to confute it; which (if you'll take my word and keep my counsel) I shall do with that clearness and fulness in every particular, great and little, both points of Learning and points of Fact, that the authors will be ashamed, if any shame can be expected in them, after this present Specimen. I have almost finished already, and near the end of the month I shall be a putting it to the press; for I need not nine months, as they have had, to confute so shallow a Book, that has nothing in it, but a little Wit, Satire and Raillery, that puts it off among half-learned readers.

I am, yours affectionately

RICHARD BENTLEY. .

Dr. Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables

of Esop, examined by the Hon. Charles Boyle.

CV.

To students of theology this letter will have a special interest. Dr. Bentley is propounding to Archbishop Wake his plan for preparing a new critical edition of the Greek Testament. During four years (1716-1720), he laboured diligently in collating the Alexandrine and Beza manuscripts in England and in putting foreign MSS. under contribution, but for reasons, which have not been satisfactorily explained, the work was never published, although a subscription in aid of it was collected.

Dr. Bentley to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Trinity College, Cambridge: April 15, 1716.

May it please your Grace,-'Tis not only your Grace's station and general character, but the particular knowledge I have of you, which encourages me to give you a long letter about those unfashionable topics, Religion and learning. Your Grace knows, as of late years with the

well as any, what an alarm has been made vast heap of Various Lections found in MSS. of the Greek Testament. The Papists have made a great use of them against the Protestants, and the Atheists against them, both. This was one of Collins's topics in his Discourse on Freethinking, which I took off in my short answer; and I have heard since from several hands, that that short view I gave of the causes and necessity and use of Various Lections, made several good men more easy in that matter than they were before. But since that time I have fallen into a course of studies that led me to peruse many of the oldest MSS. of the Greek Testament and of the Latin too of St. Jerom, of which there are several in England, a full thousand years old. The result of which has been, that I find I am able (what some thought impossible) to give an edition of the Greek Testament exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice; so that there shall not be twenty words, nor even particles, difference; and this shall carry its own demonstration in every verse, which I affirm cannot be so done of any other ancient book, Greek or Latin; so that that book, which, by the present management, is thought the most uncertain, shall have a testimony of certainty above all other books whatever, and an end be put at once to all Various Lections now or hereafter.

I'll give your Grace the progress which brought me by degrees

into the present view and scheme that I have of a new edition. Upon some points of curiosity I collated one or two of St. Paul's Epistles with the Alexandrian MS., the oldest and best now in the world: I was surprised to find several transpositions of words, that Mills and the other collators took no notice of; but I soon found their way was to mark nothing but change of words; the collocation and order they entirely neglected; and yet at sight I discerned what a new force and beauty this new order (I found in the MS.) added to the sentence. This encouraged me to collate the whole book over to a letter, with my own hands. There is another MS. at Paris of the same age and character with this ; but, meeting with worse usage, it was so decayed by age, that five hundred years ago it served the Greeks for old vellum, and they writ over the old brown capitals a book of Ephraim Syrus; but so that even now, by a good eye and a skilful person, the old writing may be read under the new. One page of this for a specimen is printed in copper cut in Lamie's Harmony of the Evangelists. Out of this, by an able hand, I have had above two hundred lections given me from the present printed Greek; and I was surprised to find that almost all agreed both in word and order with our noble Alexandrian. Some more experiments in other old copies have discovered the same agreement; so that I dare say, take all the Greek Testaments surviving, that are not occidental with Latin too, like our Beza's at Cambridge, and that are a thousand years old, and they'l so agree together that of the thirty thousand present Various Lections there are not there found two hundred.

The Western Latin copies by variety of Translators without public appointment, and a jumble and heap of all of them, were grown so uncertain, that scarce two copies were alike; which obliged Damasus, then Bishop of Rome, to employ St. Jerom to regulate the best-received translation of each part of the New Testament to the original Greek; and so set out a new edition, so castigated and corrected. This he declares in his preface he did ad Græcam veritatem, ad exemplaria Græca, sed vetera; and his learning, great name, and just authority, extinguished all the other Latin versions, and has been conveyed down to us, under the name of the Vulgate. 'Twas plain to me, that when that copy came first from that great Father's hands, it must agree exactly with the

most authentic Greek exemplars; and if now it could be retrieved, it would be the best test and voucher for the true reading out of several pretending ones. But when I came to try Pope Clement's Vulgate, I soon found the Greek of the Alexandrian and that would by no means pary. This set me to examine the Pope's Latin by some MSS. of a thousand years old; and the success is, that the old Greek copies and the old Latin so exactly agree (when an able hand discerns the rasures and the old lections lying under them), that the pleasure and satisfaction it gives me is beyond expression.

The New Testament has been under a hard fate since the invention of printing. After the Complutenses and Erasmus, who had but very ordinary MSS. it has become the property of booksellers. Robert Stephens's edition, set out and regulated by himself alone, is now become the standard. That text stands, as if an apostle was his compositor. No heathen author has had such ill fortune.

Terence, Ovid, etc. for the first century after printing, went about with twenty thousand errors in them. But when learned men undertook them, and from the oldest MSS. set out correct editions, those errors fell and vanished. But if they had kept to the first published text, and set the Various Lections only in the margin, those classic authors would be as clogged with variations as Dr. Mills's Testament is.

Pope Sixtus and Clemens at a vast expense had an assembly of learned divines, to recense and adjust the Latin Vulgate, and then enacted their new edition authentic; but I find, though I have not yet discovered anything done dolo malo, they were quite unequal to the affair. They were mere Theologi, had no experience in MSS., nor made use of good Greek copies, and followed books of five hundred years before those of double [that] age. Nay, I believe they took these new ones for the older of the two; for it is not everybody knows the age of a manuscript.

I am already tedious, and the post is a going. So that, to conclude, in a word, I find that by taking two thousand errors out of the Pope's Vulgate, and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephens's, I can set out an edition of each in columns, without using any book under nine hundred years old, that shall so exactly