My feelings for Bentley's Horace are best shown by an account of the steps by which I came to study the book. As a schoolboy one knew the name of Bentley; he was mentioned in the notes almost always with disagreement, especially by Page. When one passed on to the Satires and Epistles, he was mentioned with more frequency and on the whole more sympathy by Palmer and Wilkins; his name, or his symbol B, occurred continually in the apparatus criticus, though even so his suggestions very rarely appeared in the Text. As an undergraduate, one came to regard him as something more than a name: in scholarship apparently he was regarded as a ‘giant’ by Wickham and Munro and Jebb; as a man he was seemingly a high-handed and tyrannical Master of Trinity, for years battling single-handed against lawful authority. And then one began, as a Sixth Form Master, to con the Text of Horace more closely; but the result was not to increase one's admiration of Bentley. In youth one looked for dazzling and palmary emendations, but most of his suggestions one saw to be supported by some manuscript or other. In the Oxford Text of the Odes his name appears fairly often in the critical notes, but in only nine places is there mention of his own conjectures and not one is admitted to the Text. Further research showed that these were only a small selection from a host of emendations, some eight hundred in the whole Horatian Corpus—many of which struck one as arbitrary and improbable. Why then, one asked, all this fuss about Bentley, or at least about Bentley's Horace? In his Terence many of his changes are generally accepted and he laid the foundations for a knowledge of Terentian metre. His Manilius shows a number of emendations which have appeared in every edition since his; and one read of his brilliant reconstructions of Greek Comic Fragments. But why should Wickham speak of him as vir omnium maximus qui Horatium attigerunt ‘who collected all that editors had achieved before him and laid the foundations for all who came after’? And one remembered Housman's chastening dictum: ‘Bentley admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars’.