Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Bentley / by R. C. Jebb. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![!•] earliest manhood (iam ab adolescentia), is too vague to prove anything. Monk remarks that there were no prizes for classics at Cambridge then. It may be ob- served, however, that there was one very important prize—the Craven University Scholarship, founded in 1647. But no competition is recorded between 1670, when Bentley was eight years old, and 1681, the year after he took his first degree. The studies of the Cambridge Schools were Logic, Ethics, Natural Philo- sophy, and Mathematics. Bentley took high honours in these. His place was nominally sixth in the first class, but really third, since three of those above him were men of straw. The Vice-Chancellor and the two Proctors then possessed the privilege of interpolating one name each in the list, simply as a compliment, and they naturally felt that such a compliment was nothing if it was not courageous. Bentley’s degree had no real like- ness, of course, to that of third Wrangier now j modern Mathematics Were only beginning, and the other subjects of the Schools had more weight; the testing process, too, was far from thorough. Bentley never got a Fellowship. In his time,—in- deed, until the present century,—there were territorial restrictions at almost all Colleges. As a native of Yorkshire, he had been elected to a Constable scholarship, but the same circumstance excluded him from a greater prize. When he graduated, two Fellowships at St John’s were already held by Yorkshiremen, and a third re- presentative of the same county was inadmissible. He was a candidate, indeed, in 1682; but as no person not in Priest’s Orders was eligible on that occasion, he must have gone in merely to show what he could do. The College was enabled to recognise him in other ways,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28037224_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
