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from the privations to which his wife and children were exposed by poverty, that his health gave way, and he died of a decline in April 1707, not having completed his thirtieth year. He did not live to enjoy the success of The Beaux' Stratagem, the latest and perhaps the most sparkling of his comedies. Farquhar was a romantic creature, "splenetic and yet amorous"; for several years he was a soldier, and lieutenant in an Irish regiment, but he had at last to sell his commission to pay his debts. He was a warm-hearted, glowing man, too sensitive to bear the blows of life and ill-prepared to parry them.

The long life of Colley Cibber (1671-1757) extends far into the eighteenth century, to which it seems to belong, but he was actually writing for the stage a little earlier than Vanbrugh or Farquhar. He was the son of Caius Gabriel Cibber, a Danish sculptor settled in London, where he was born, on the 6th of November 1671, in Southampton Street, Covent Garden. He was sent to school at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, and was to have proceeded to Cambridge, but his father being at Chatsworth engaged on some decorations, the Earl of Devonshire saw the young Colley, and took him into his service. Before he was twenty, however, he had determined to be an actor, but after six years' training, and in spite of the patronage of Congreve, he made little advance, until, in 1696, he brought out his first comedy of Love's Last Shift, and began to attract more attention. He supplied the declining stage with pieces of all kinds, and from 1708 to 1733 was one of the managers of Drury Lane Theatre. He continued to act even in old age, his last appearance being in the part of Pandulph, in his own tragedy of Papal Tyranny, in February 1745On the death of the Rev. Lawrence Eusden (. . .-1730), Cibber was appointed poetlaureate, and began to produce deplorable birthday odes. In the course of his life, Cibber produced a very large number of dramatic pieces, of which he published about thirty. He succeeded best in social comedy, and his Careless Husband (1706), and The Nonjuror (1718), display his easy talent at its brightest; it is to the credit of his plays that they are far more decent than those of his predecessors and early contemporaries. Cibber is remembered, however, less for his dramatic writings than for his pamphlet controversy (1742-44) with Pope, in which, to a surprising degree, he got the better of the eminent antagonist who so rashly attacked him; and for his Apology (1740), an autobiography delightful in itself, and precious for the information which it supplies regarding the theatrical life of an obscure and yet very interesting period (1690-1730). Colley Cibber lived until the 12th of December 1757, having reached his eighty-seventh year. He died in his house at Islington, painlessly and suddenly, after a life "passed in the utmost ease, gaiety, and good-humour," and was buried in the vault of the Danish church in Whitechapel.

Thomas Southerne (1660-1746) was born at Oxmantown in co. Dublin in 1660. After spending a few months at Trinity College, he left Ireland and became in 1678 a student of the Middle Temple. He then proceeded to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1683. A year earlier, however, he had begun his career as a dramatist with The Loyal Brother, a highly successful tragedy. Of his numerous plays-several of which enjoyed very large pecuniary success-the most famous were The Fatal Marriage, 1694, and Oroonoko, 1696. Southerne was a soldier, and rose to be captain in an infantry regiment. The last twenty years of his life were spent in repose in Westminster, and he, who in his youth had been intimate with Dryden, survived to be an object of respectful interest to Gray.

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Susanna Freeman, known as Mrs. Centlivre (1680-1723), after romantic adventures-she spent some months disguised as a young man in a Cambridge college -took to the stage in 1700 as author and actress. In the latter capacity she had little talent; in the former she enjoyed much success, and published nineteen plays, of which The Busy Body (1709), and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), have genuine vivacity, and display the last flashes of the social wit of Etheredge and Congreve. She married the Queen's cook, Mr. Joseph Centlivre, who had a house in Spring Gardens, where the dramatist died on the 1st of December 1723.

No general survey of the close of the seventeenth century could be complete without a reference to the celebrated dispute as to what was called the Old and the New Philosophy. It occupied all the countries of Europe, but chiefly France, where the private sessions of the French Academy were torn with disputes about the relative importance of the ancient and the modern writers. It was raised very definitely by Fontenelle in 1688, and by Perrault, each of whom was on the side of the moderns. In this country, in 1692, Temple, with voluminous elegance and pomp, printed a solemn defence of the Greeks and Latins, and took occasion to praise, in terms of the most exaggerated hyperbole, certain Epistles of Phalaris, supposed to be written in Attic Greek by a Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century before Christ. Nobody possessed Phalaris, and to meet a sudden demand a publisher issued an edition of his text in 1695. RICHARD BENTLEY had somewhat contemptuously denied the authenticity of the Letters, and Charles Boyle, the editor, although he was himself a doubter, took occasion to charge Bentley with roughness and discourtesy. Bentley sharply defended his position in an extended Appendix to the second edition of William Wotton's Reflections in 1697; in this he expressed his contempt for the spurious Phalaris and for Boyle's editorial ineptitude. Boyle's Church friends replied with Dr. Bentley's Dissertation Examin'd, 1698, and this drew from Bentley the Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris, 1699, which marks an era in the development of European scholarship. It is the most brilliant piece of destructive commentary that, perhaps, was ever published, and it revealed in Bentley a critic of an entirely new order. But even more extraordinary was the textual and verbal work of Bentley, whose discovery, as Bunsen has pointed out, is the science of historical philology. Into the controversy which raged around the phantom of Phalaris Swift presently descended; but he added nothing to scholarship, and what he gave to literature must be treated in the next chapter. Meanwhile it is not uninstructive to find Bentley closing these forty years of mainly critical movement with such an exact criticism of the ancients as no one since the days of Scaliger had approached.

Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was the son of a yeoman in the hamlet of Oulton, near Wakefield, in Yorkshire, where he was born on the 27th of January 1662. He went to school at Wakefield at ten, and at fourteen proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, as a sub-sizar. On leaving the University he became headmaster of Spalding School, and later on, in 1682, tutor to the second son of Dean Stillingfleet. In the Deanery of St. Paul's Bentley's life was now spent until 1689, and all this time he was

widening his already considerable knowledge of the Greek and Latin writers. When Stillingfleet was made Bishop of Worcester, Bentley took orders and resided in Oxford; here, while working in the Bodleian, his first literary schemes took shape. In 1691 he published his Letter to Mill, in which he proved himself "a new and brilliant light" in English classical criticism. In March 1692, he delivered his famous Boyle Lectures in the Church of St. Martin's in London. His criticism of Callimachus in 1693 proved him the finest intuitive scholar in Europe, and in 1694 he was appointed Royal Librarian.

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It is in evidence that already his great eminence had come too suddenly for Bentley's modesty to endure it. some one who remarked on the young critic's powers to Stilling fleet, the Bishop replied, "Yes, had he but the gift of humility he would be the most extraordinary man in Europe." In 1695 the long controversy on the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns resolved itself in England into the controversy on the Letters of Phalaris, in which Bentley took a prominent part until at least 1699. The contest was brilliantly, but most unfairly, summed up by Swift in his Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Later, in 1699, Bentley was appointed Master of Trinity College, and Cambridge became his residence for the remainder of his life. He quarrelled almost inmediately with the fellows about a college dividend, and being made vice-chancellor immediately vetoed the gaieties of Sturbridge Fair. From the first, he is accused of arbitrary and intolerant behaviour, and even if certain reforms were needful at Trinity, Bentley's manner of introducing them was extremely vexatious. Nevertheless, for ten years the fellows of Trinity endured him, even when, as Professor Jebb says, "he denounced them as the refuse of humanity because they dared to lift their heads against his insolent assumption of absolute power." At Christmas, 1709, they at length plucked up courage to beard the terrible Master, who flung out of the room, exclaiming: "Henceforward, farewell peace to Trinity College." Thereupon, indeed, began a period of extraordinary disturbance, in the course of which Bentley saw himself attacked by the University, the court, and the law, but through which, with an amazing pertinacity, he stuck to his principles and abated nothing of his pride. In 1724 his degrees, of all of which he had been deprived, were restored to him, and

Richard Bentley