mistakes in his historical allusions. Addison had done no better. In his work on the Evidences of Christianity, as Macaulay reminds us, Addison “assigns as grounds of his religious belief, stories as absurd as the Cock Lane ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland’s Vortigern, puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the Senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority.” Yet Addison was the pride of Oxford, and his work in defence of orthodoxy was received with applause, while the heresy of Collins was scouted. Bentley succeeded by attacking the illustrations and avoiding the question at issue. He exposed the inferior scholarship of his adversary, and made out that his bad Greek was the outcome of a wicked heart. “Inquire closely into their lives and you will find why they declaim against religion.” He even hints that the magistrate should take care of Collins either in a prison or dark rooms, and suggests that the Government should “oblige your East India Company to take on board the whole growing sect, and lodge them at Madagascar, among their confessed and claimed kindred (since they make themselves but a higher species of brutes), the monkeys and the drills.” This suggests that Lord Monboddo was not, as generally supposed, the first to maintain that apes were allied to the human species. Bentley left his attack unfinished in two parts, because the court refused to back him in his demand for certain academical fees, and he consequently discovered that “those whom he wrote for were as bad as those he wrote against.” The phrase, says Leslie Stephen, supplies a queer confusion between the interests of the Church of Christ and those of the Court of George I.
Richard Cumberland, a grandson of Bentley, says, in the romance entitled His Life, that Collins was afterwards helped by Bentley, who, conceiving that by having ruined his character as a writer he had been the occasion of his personal misery, liberally contributed to his maintenance. “In vain,” says Isaac D’Israeli in his Curiosities of Literature, “I mentioned to that elegant writer, who was not curious about facts, that this person could never have been Anthony Collins, who had always a plentiful fortune; and when it was suggested to him that this A. Collins, as he printed it, must have been
