The battle of the books between the ancients and the moderns at the turn of the eighteenth century provides a useful point of departure, not least because the quarrel raged on both sides of the Channel. How far did the pioneering scholarship of the Modern Richard Bentley shape a more distinctively critical and philological Enlightenment in England? On the other hand, their cultural conservatism notwithstanding, were the Ancients necessarily an anti-Enlightenment party?