The year 1962 marks the tercentenary of the birth of Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, editor of Paradise Lost, but principally and justly famous as one of the greatest classical scholars. To mark the event, the University of Toronto Press is issuing a special reprint of Alexander Dyce’s edition of the Epistola (1691), the work which first brought Bentley fame, and which has long been out of print.This Latin exercise was called forth by one of those unhappy productions which, mediocre themselves, have had the ill luck to attract the inspection of genius. In the eighth or ninth century A.D., Joannes Malelas of Antioch, a Greek writer, attempted a chronological record of mankind and in it he had recourse to name or "e from classical works no longer extant. English scholars in the seventeenth century prepared a translation of the chronicle into Latin and an accompanying commentary; just before its publication, under the final editorship of John Mill, Bentley was given an opportunity to read proof-sheets and the result was the Epistola, a collection mainly of some twenty-five notes upon statements found in or topics suggested by Malelas. This |