Bentley, says Wolf, both as man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, or else praised maliciously.

Markland, towards the end of his life—as was the case with so many others like him—became imbued with a repugnance for all scholarly reputation, to such an extent, indeed, that he partly tore up and partly burnt several works which he had long had in hand.

Wolf says: "The amount of intellectual food that can be got from well-digested scholarship is a very insignificant item."

In Winckelmann's youth there were no philological studies apart from the ordinary bread-winning branches of the science—people read and explained the ancients in order to prepare themselves for the better interpretation of the Bible and the Corpus Juris.