Home > Authors Index > Browse all available works of Isaac Disraeli > Text of Warburton, And His Quarrels; Including An Illustration Of his Literary Character
An essay by Isaac Disraeli |
||
Warburton, And His Quarrels; Including An Illustration Of his Literary Character |
||
|
________________________________________________
Title: Warburton, And His Quarrels; Including An Illustration Of his Literary Character Author: Isaac Disraeli [More Titles by Disraeli] The name of Warburton more familiar to us than his Works--declared to be "a Colossus" by a Warburtonian, who afterwards shrinks the image into "a human size"--Lowth's caustic retort on his Attorneyship--motives for the change to Divinity--his first literary mischances--Warburton and his Welsh Prophet--his Dedications--his mean flatteries--his taste more struck by the monstrous than the beautiful--the effects of his opposite studies--the SECRET PRINCIPLE which conducted Warburton through all his Works--the curious argument of his Alliance between Church and State--the bold paradox of his Divine Legation--the demonstration ends in a conjecture--Warburton lost in the labyrinth he had ingeniously constructed--confesses the harassed state of his mind--attacked by Infidels and Christians--his SECRET PRINCIPLE turns the poetical narrative of Æneas into the Eleusinian Mysteries--Hurd attacks Jortin; his Attic irony translated into plain English--Warburton's paradox on Eloquence; his levity of ideas renders his sincerity suspected--Leland refutes the whimsical paradox--Hurd attacks Leland--Leland's noble triumph--Warburton's SECRET PRINCIPLE operating in Modern Literature: on Pope's Essay on Man--Lord Bolingbroke the author of the Essay--Pope received Warburton as his tutelary genius--Warburton's systematic treatment of his friends and rival editors--his literary artifices and little intrigues--his Shakspeare--the whimsical labours of Warburton on Shakspeare annihilated by Edwards's "Canons of Criticism"--Warburton and Johnson--Edwards and Warburton's mutual attacks--the concealed motive of his edition of Shakspeare avowed in his justification--his SECRET PRINCIPLE further displayed in Pope's Works--attacks Akenside; Dyson's generous defence--correct Ridicule is a test of Truth, illustrated by a well-known case--Warburton a literary revolutionist; aimed to be a perpetual dictator--the ambiguous tendency of his speculations--the Warburtonian School supported by the most licentious principles--specimens of its peculiar style--the use to which Warburton applied the Dunciad--his party: attentive to raise recruits--the active and subtle Hurd--his extreme sycophancy--Warburton, to maintain his usurped authority, adopted his system of literary quarrels.
Of great characters, whose actions are well known, and of those who, whatever claim they may have to distinction, are not so, ARISTOTLE has delivered a precept with his accustomed sagacity. If Achilles, says the Stagirite, be the subject of our inquiries, since all know what he has done, we are simply to indicate his actions, without stopping to detail; but this would not serve for Critias; for whatever relates to him must be fully told, since he is known to few;[142]--a critical precept, which ought to be frequently applied in the composition of this work. The history of Warburton is now well known; the facts lie dispersed in the chronological biographer;[143] but the secret connexion which exists between them, if there shall be found to be any, has not yet been brought out; and it is my business to press these together; hence to demonstrate principles, or to deduce inferences. The literary fame of Warburton was a portentous meteor: it seemed unconnected with the whole planetary system through which it rolled, and it was imagined to be darting amid new creations, as the tail of each hypothesis blazed with idle fancies.[144] Such extraordinary natures cannot be looked on with calm admiration, nor common hostility; all is the tumult of wonder about such a man; and his adversaries, as well as his friends, though differently affected, are often overcome by the same astonishment. To a Warburtonian, the object of his worship looks indeed of colossal magnitude, in the glare thrown about that hallowed spot; nor is the divinity of common stature; but the light which makes him appear so great, must not be suffered to conceal from us the real standard by which only his greatness can be determined:[145] even literary enthusiasm, delightful to all generous tempers, may be too prodigal of its splendours, wasting itself while it shines; but truth remains behind! Truth, which, like the asbestos, is still unconsumed and unaltered amidst these glowing fires. The genius of Warburton has called forth two remarkable anonymous criticisms--in one, all that the most splendid eloquence can bring to bear against this chief and his adherents;[146] and in the other, all that taste, warmed by a spark of Warburtonian fire, can discriminate in an impartial decision.[147] Mine is a colder and less grateful task. I am but a historian! I have to creep along in the darkness of human events, to lay my hand cautiously on truths so difficult to touch, and which either the panegyrist or the writer of an invective cover over, and throw aside into corners. Much of the moral, and something too of the physical dispositions of the man enter into the literary character; and, moreover, there are localities--the place where he resides, the circumstances which arise, and the habits he contracts; to all these the excellences and the defects of some of our great literary characters may often be traced. With this clue we may thread our way through the labyrinth of Genius. Warburton long resided in an obscure provincial town, the articled clerk of a country attorney,[148] and then an unsuccessful practising one. He seems, too, once to have figured as "a wine-merchant in the Borough," and rose into notice as "the orator of a disputing club;" but, in all his shapes, still keen in literary pursuits, without literary connexions; struggling with all the defects of a desultory and self-taught education, but of a bold aspiring character, he rejected, either in pride or in despair, his little trades, and took Deacon's orders--to exchange a profession, unfavourable to continuity of study, for another more propitious to its indulgence.[149] In a word, he set off as a literary adventurer, who was to win his way by earning it from patronage. His first mischances were not of a nature to call forth that intrepidity which afterwards hardened into the leading feature of his character. Few great authors have begun their race with less auspicious omens, though an extraordinary event in the life of an author happened to Warburton--he had secured a patron before he was an author. The first publication of his which we know, was his "Translations in Prose and Verse from Roman Poets, Orators, and Historians." 1724. He was then about twenty-five years of age. The fine forms of classic beauty could never be cast in so rough a mould as his prose; and his turgid unmusical verses betrayed qualities of mind incompatible with the delicacy of poetry. Four years afterwards he repeated another bolder attempt, in his "Critical and Philosophical Inquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles." After this publication, I wonder Warburton was ever suspected of infidelity or even scepticism.[150] So radically deficient in Warburton was that fine internal feeling which we call taste, that through his early writings he acquired not one solitary charm of diction,[151] and scarcely betrayed, amid his impurity of taste, that nerve and spirit which afterwards crushed all rival force. His translations in imitation of Milton's style betray his utter want of ear and imagination. He attempted to suppress both these works during his lifetime. When these unlucky productions were republished by Dr. Parr, the Dedications were not forgotten; they were both addressed to the same opulent baronet, not omitting "the virtues" of his lady the Countess of Sunderland, whose marriage he calls "so divine a union." Warburton had shown no want of judgment in the choice of his patrons; for they had more than one living in their gift--and perhaps, knowing his patrons, none in the dedications themselves. They had, however, this absurdity, that in freely exposing the servile practices of dedicators, the writer was himself indulging in that luxurious sin, which he so forcibly terms "Public Prostitution." This early management betrays no equivocal symptoms of that traffic in Dedications, of which he has been so severely accused,[152] and of that paradoxical turn and hardy effrontery which distinguished his after-life. These dedications led to preferment, and thus hardily was laid the foundation-stone of his aspiring fortunes. Till his thirtieth year, Warburton evinced a depraved taste, but a craving appetite for knowledge. His mind was constituted to be more struck by the Monstrous than the Beautiful, much like that Sicilian prince who furnished his villa with the most hideous figures imaginable:[153] the delight resulting from harmonious and delicate forms raised emotions of too weak a nature to move his obliquity of taste; roused, however, by the surprise excited by colossal ugliness. The discovery of his intellectual tastes, at this obscure period of his life, besides in those works we have noticed, is confirmed by one of the most untoward accidents which ever happened to a literary man; it was the chance-discovery of a letter he had written to one of the heroes of the Dunciad, forty years before. At the time that letter was written, his literary connexions were formed with second-rate authors; he was in strict intimacy with Concanen and Theobald, and other "ingenious gentlemen who made up our last night's conversation," as he expresses himself.[154] This letter is full of the heresies of taste: one of the most anomalous is the comment on that well-known passage in Shakspeare, on "the genius and the mortal instruments;" Warburton's is a miraculous specimen of fantastical sagacity and critical delirium, or the art of discovering meanings never meant, and of illustrations the author could never have known. Warburton declares to "the ingenious gentlemen," (whom afterwards with a Pharaoh's heart he hanged by dozens to posterity in the "Dunciad,") that "Pope borrowed for want of genius;" that poet, who, when the day arrived, he was to comment on as the first of poets! His insulting criticisms on the popular writings of Addison,--his contempt for what Young calls "sweet elegant Virgilian prose,"--show how utterly insensible he was to that classical taste in which Addison had constructed his materials. But he who could not taste the delicacy of Addison, it may be imagined might be in raptures with the rant of Lee. There is an unerring principle in the false sublime: it seems to be governed by laws, though they are not ours; and we know what it will like, that is, we know what it will mistake for what ought not to be liked, as surely as we can anticipate what will delight correct taste. Warburton has pronounced one of the raving passages of poor Nat "to contain not only the most sublime, but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint." JOSEPH WARTON, who indignantly rejects it from his edition of Pope, asserts that "we have not in our language a more striking example of true turgid expression, and genuine fustian and bombast."[155] Yet such was the man whom ill-fortune (for the public at least) had chosen to become the commentator of our greater poets! Again Churchill throws light on our character:--
Had this great man journalised his readings, as Gibbon has done, we should perhaps be more astonished at his miscellaneous pursuits. He read everything, and, I suspect, with little distinction, and equal delight.[156] Curiosity, even to its delirium, was his first passion; which produced those new systems of hypothetical reasoning by which he startled the world; and his efforts to save his most ingenious theories from absurdity resembled, to use his own emphatic words applied to the philosophy of Leibnitz, "a contrivance against Fatalism," for though his genius has given a value to the wildest paradoxes, paradoxes they remain. But if Warburton read so much, it was not to enforce opinions already furnished to his hands, or with cold scepticism to reject them, leaving the reader in despair. He read that he might write what no one else had written, and which at least required to be refuted before it was condemned. He hit upon a SECRET PRINCIPLE, which prevails through all his works, and this was INVENTION; a talent, indeed, somewhat dangerous to introduce in researches where Truth, and not Fancy, was to be addressed. But even with all this originality he was not free from imitation, and has even been accused of borrowing largely without hinting at his obligations. He had certainly one favourite model before him: Warburton has delineated the portrait of a certain author with inimitable minuteness, while he caught its general effect; we feel that the artist, in tracing the resemblance of another, is inspired by all the flattery of a self-painter--he perceived the kindred features, and he loved them! This author was BAYLE! And I am unfolding the character of Warburton, in copying the very original portrait:-- "Mr. Bayle is of a quite different character from these Italian sophists: a writer, whose strength and clearness of reasoning can be equalled only by the gaiety, easiness, and delicacy of his wit; who, pervading human nature with a glance, STRUCK INTO THE PROVINCE OF PARADOX, as an exercise for the restless vigour of his mind: who, with a soul superior to the sharpest attacks of fortune, and a heart practised to the best philosophy, had not yet enough of real greatness to overcome that last foible of superior geniuses, the temptation of honour, which the ACADEMIC EXERCISE OF WIT is conceived to bring to its professors."[157] Here, then, we discover the SECRET PRINCIPLE which conducted Warburton through all his works, although of the most opposite natures. I do not give this as an opinion to be discussed, but as a fact to be demonstrated. The faculties so eminent in Bayle were equally so in Warburton. In his early studies he had particularly applied himself to logic; and was not only a vigorous reasoner, but one practised in all the finesse of dialectics. He had wit, fertile indeed, rather than delicate; and a vast body of erudition, collected in the uninterrupted studies of twenty years. But it was the SECRET PRINCIPLE, or, as he calls it, "the Academic exercise of Wit," on an enlarged system, which carried him so far in the new world of INVENTION he was creating. This was a new characteristic of investigation; it led him on to pursue his profounder inquiries beyond the clouds of antiquity; for what he could not discover, he CONJECTURED and ASSERTED. Objects, which in the hands of other men were merely matters resting on authentic researches, now received the stamp and lustre of original invention. Nothing was to be seen in the state in which others had viewed it; the hardiest paradoxes served his purpose best, and this licentious principle produced unlooked-for discoveries. He humoured his taste, always wild and unchastised, in search of the monstrous and the extravagant; and, being a wit, he delighted in finding resemblances in objects which to more regulated minds had no similarity whatever. Wit may exercise its ingenuity as much in combining things unconnected with each other, as in its odd assemblage of ideas; and Warburton, as a literary antiquary, proved to be as witty in his combinations as BUTLER and CONGREVE in their comic images. As this principle took full possession of the mind of this man of genius, the practice became so familiar, that it is possible he might at times have been credulous enough to have confided in his own reveries. As he forcibly expressed himself on one of his adversaries, Dr. STEBBING, "Thus it is to have to do with a head whose sense is all run to system." "His Academic Wit" now sported amid whimsical theories, pursued bold but inconclusive arguments, marked out subtile distinctions, and discovered incongruous resemblances; but they were maintained by an imposing air of conviction, furnished with the most prodigal erudition, and they struck out many ingenious combinations. The importance or the curiosity of the topics awed or delighted his readers; the principle, however licentious, by the surprise it raised, seduced the lovers of novelties. Father HARDOUIN had studied as hard as Warburton, rose as early, and retired to rest as late, and the obliquity of his intellect resembled that of Warburton--but he was a far inferior genius; he only discovered that the classical works of antiquity, the finest compositions of the human mind, in ages of its utmost refinement, had been composed by the droning monks of the middle ages; a discovery which only surprised by its tasteless absurdity--but the absurdities of Warburton had more dignity, were more delightful, and more dangerous: they existed, as it were, in a state of illusion, but illusion which required as much genius and learning as his own to dissipate. His spells were to be disturbed only by a magician, great as himself. Conducted by this solitary principle, Warburton undertook, as it were, a magical voyage into antiquity. He passed over the ocean of time, sailing amid rocks, and half lost on quicksands; but he never failed to raise up some terra incognita; or point at some scene of the Fata Morgana, some earthly spot, painted in the heaven one knows not how. In this secret principle of resolving to invent what no other had before conceived, by means of conjecture and assertion, and of maintaining his theories with all the pride of a sophist, and all the fierceness of an inquisitor, we have the key to all the contests by which this great mind so long supported his literary usurpations. The first step the giant took showed the mightiness of his stride. His first great work was the famous "Alliance between Church and State." It surprised the world, who saw the most important subject depending on a mere curious argument, which, like all political theories, was liable to be overthrown by writers of opposite principles.[158] The term "Alliance" seemed to the dissenters to infer that the Church was an independent power, forming a contract with the State, and not acknowledging that it is only an integral part, like that of the army or the navy.[159] Warburton had not probably decided, at that time, on the principle of ecclesiastical power: whether it was paramount by its divine origin, as one party asserted; or whether, as the new philosophers, Hobbes, Selden, and others, insisted, the spiritual was secondary to the civil power.[160] The intrepidity of this vast genius appears in the plan of his greater work. The omission of a future state of reward and punishment, in the Mosaic writings, was perpetually urged as a proof that the mission was not of divine origin: the ablest defenders strained at obscure or figurative passages, to force unsatisfactory inferences; but they were looking after what could not be found. Warburton at once boldly acknowledged it was not there; at once adopted all the objections of the infidels: and roused the curiosity of both parties by the hardy assertion, that this very omission was a demonstration of its divine origin.[161] The first idea of this new project was bold and delightful, and the plan magnificent. Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, the three great religions of mankind, were to be marshalled in all their pomp, and their awe, and their mystery. But the procession changed to a battle! To maintain one great paradox, he was branching out into innumerable ones. This great work was never concluded: the author wearied himself, without, however, wearying his readers; and, as his volumes appeared, he was still referring to his argument, "as far as it is yet advanced." The demonstration appeared in great danger of ending in a conjecture; and this work, always beginning and never ending, proved to be the glory and misery of his life.[162] In perpetual conflict with those numerous adversaries it roused, Warburton often shifted his ground, and broke into so many divisions, that when he cried out, Victory! his scattered forces seemed rather to be in flight than in pursuit.[163] The same SECRET PRINCIPLE led him to turn the poetical narrative of Æneas in the infernal regions, an episode evidently imitated by Virgil from his Grecian master, into a minute description of the initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. A notion so perfectly new was at least worth a commonplace truth. Was it not delightful to have so many particulars detailed of a secret transaction, which even its contemporaries of two thousand years ago did not presume to know anything about? Father Hardouin seems to have opened the way for Warburton, since he had discovered that the whole Æneid was an allegorical voyage of St. Peter to Rome! When Jortin, in one of his "Six Dissertations," modestly illustrated Virgil by an interpretation inconsistent with Warburton's strange discovery, it produced a memorable quarrel. Then Hurd, the future shield, scarcely the sword, of Warburton, made his first sally; a dapper, subtle, and cold-blooded champion, who could dexterously turn about the polished weapon of irony.[164] So much our Railleur admired the volume of Jortin, that he favoured him with "A Seventh Dissertation, addressed to the Author of the Sixth, on the Delicacy of Friendship," one of the most malicious, but the keenest pieces of irony. It served as the foundation of a new School of Criticism, in which the arrogance of the master was to be supported by the pupil's contempt of men often his superiors. To interpret Virgil differently from the modern Stagirite, was, by the aggravating art of the ridiculer, to be considered as the violation of a moral feeling.[165] Jortin bore the slow torture and the teasing of Hurd's dissecting-knife in dignified silence. At length a rising genius demonstrated how Virgil could not have described the Eleusinian Mysteries in the sixth book of the Æneid. One blow from the arm of Gibbon shivered the allegorical fairy palace into glittering fragments.[166] When the sceptical Middleton, in his "Essay on the Gift of Tongues," pretended to think that "an inspired language would be perfect in its kind, with all the purity of Plato and the eloquence of Cicero," and then asserted that "the style of the New Testament was utterly rude and barbarous, and abounding with every fault that can possibly deform a language," Warburton, as was his custom, instantly acquiesced; but hardily maintained that "this very barbarism was one certain mark of a divine original."[167]--The curious may follow his subtile argument in his "Doctrine of Grace;" but, in delivering this paradox, he struck at the fundamental principles of eloquence: he dilated on all the abuses of that human art. It was precisely his utter want of taste which afforded him so copious an argument; for he asserted that the principles of eloquence were arbitrary and chimerical, and its various modes "mostly fantastical;" and that, consequently, there was no such thing as a good taste,[168] except what the consent of the learned had made; an expression borrowed from Quintilian. A plausible and a consolatory argument for the greater part of mankind! It, however, roused the indignation of Leland, the eloquent translator of Demosthenes, and the rhetorical professor at Trinity College, in Dublin, who has nobly defended the cause of classical taste and feeling by profounder principles. His classic anger produced his "Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence;" a volume so much esteemed that it is still reprinted. Leland refuted the whimsical paradox, yet complimented Warburton, who, "with the spirit and energy of an ancient orator, was writing against eloquence," while he showed that the style of the New Testament was defensible on surer grounds. Hurd, who had fleshed his polished weapon on poor Jortin, and had been received into the arms of the hero under whom he now fought, adventured to cast his javelin at Leland: it was dipped in the cold poison of contempt and petulance. It struck, but did not canker, leaves that were immortal.[169] Leland, with the native warmth of his soil, could not resist the gratification of a reply; but the nobler part of the triumph was, the assistance he lent to the circulation of Hurd's letter, by reprinting it with his own reply, to accompany a new edition of his "Dissertation on Eloquence."[170] We now pursue the SECRET PRINCIPLE, operating on lighter topics; when, turning commentator, with the same originality as when an author, his character as a literary adventurer is still more prominent, extorting double senses, discovering the most fantastical allusions, and making men of genius but of confined reading, learned, with all the lumber of his own unwieldy erudition. When the German professor CROUSAZ published a rigid examen of the doctrines in POPE'S "Essay on Man," Warburton volunteered a defence of Pope. Some years before, it appears that Warburton himself, in a literary club at Newark, had produced a dissertation against those very doctrines! where he asserted that "the Essay was collected from the worst passages of the worst authors." This probably occurred at the time he declared that Pope had no genius! BOLINGBROKE really WROTE the "Essay on Man," which Pope versified.[171] His principles may be often objectionable; but those who only read this fine philosophical poem for its condensed verse, its imagery, and its generous sentiments, will run no danger from a metaphysical system they will not care to comprehend. But this serves not as an apology for Warburton, who now undertook an elaborate defence of what he had himself condemned, and for which purpose he has most unjustly depressed Crousaz--an able logician, and a writer ardent in the cause of religion. This commentary on the "Essay on Man," then, looks much like the work of a sophist and an adventurer! Pope, who was now alarmed at the tendency of some of those principles he had so innocently versified, received Warburton as his tutelary genius. A mere poet was soon dazzled by the sorcery of erudition; and he himself, having nothing of that kind of learning, believed Warburton to be the Scaliger of the age, for his gratitude far exceeded his knowledge.[172] The poet died in this delusion: he consigned his immortal works to the mercy of a ridiculous commentary and a tasteless commentator, whose labours have cost so much pains to subsequent editors to remove. Yet from this moment we date the worldly fortunes of Warburton.--Pope presented him with the entire property of his works; introduced him to a blind and obedient patron, who bestowed on him a rich wife, by whom he secured a fine mansion; till at length, the mitre crowned his last ambition. Such was the large chapter of accidents in Warburton's life! There appears in Warburton's conduct respecting the editions of the great poets which he afterwards published, something systematic; he treated the several editors of those very poets, THEOBALD, HANMER, and GREY, who were his friends, with the same odd sort of kindness: when he was unknown to the world, he cheerfully contributed to all their labours, and afterwards abused them with the liveliest severity.[173] It is probable that he had himself projected these editions as a source of profit, but had contributed to the more advanced labours of his rival editors, merely as specimens of his talent, that the public might hereafter be thus prepared for his own more perfect commentaries. Warburton employed no little art[174] to excite the public curiosity respecting his future Shakspeare: he liberally presented Dr. BIRCH with his MS. notes for that great work the "General Dictionary," no doubt as the prelude of his after-celebrated edition. Birch was here only a dupe: he escaped, unlike Theobald, Hanmer, and Grey, from being overwhelmed with ridicule and contempt. When these extraordinary specimens of emendatory and illustrative criticism appeared in the "General Dictionary," with general readers they excited all the astonishment of perfect novelty. It must have occurred to them, that no one as yet had understood Shakspeare; and, indeed, that it required no less erudition than that of the new luminary now rising in the critical horizon to display the amazing erudition of this most recondite poet. Conjectural criticism not only changed the words but the thoughts of the author; perverse interpretations of plain matters. Many a striking passage was wrested into a new meaning: plain words were subtilised to remove conceits; here one line was rejected, and there an interpolation, inspired alone by critical sagacity, pretended to restore a lost one; and finally, a source of knowledge was opened in the notes, on subjects which no other critic suspected could, by any ingenuity, stand connected with Shakspeare's text. At length the memorable edition appeared: all the world knows its chimeras.[175] One of its most remarkable results was the production of that work, which annihilated the whimsical labours of Warburton, Edwards's "Canons of Criticism," one of those successful facetious criticisms which enliven our literary history. Johnson, awed by the learning of Warburton, and warmed by a personal feeling for a great genius who had condescended to encourage his first critical labour, grudgingly bestows a moderated praise on this exquisite satire, which he characterises for "its airy petulance, suitable enough to the levity of the controversy." He compared this attack "to a fly, which may sting and tease a horse, but yet the horse is the nobler animal."[176] Among the prejudices of criticism, is one which hinders us from relishing a masterly performance, when it ridicules a favourite author; but to us, mere historians, truth will always prevail over literary favouritism. The work of Edwards effected its purpose, that of "laughing down Warburton to his proper rank and character."[177] Warburton designates himself as "a critic by profession;" and tells us, he gave this edition "to deter the unlearned writer from wantonly trifling with an art he is a stranger to, at the expense of the integrity of the text of established authors." Edwards has placed a N.B. on this declaration:--"A writer may properly be called unlearned, who, notwithstanding all his other knowledge, does not understand the subject which he writes upon." But the most dogmatical absurdity was Warburton's declaration, that it was once his design to have given "a body of canons for criticism, drawn out in form, with a glossary;" and further he informs the reader, that though this has not been done by him, if the reader will take the trouble, he may supply himself, as these canons of criticism lie scattered in the course of the notes. This idea was seized on with infinite humour by Edwards, who, from these very notes, has framed a set of "Canons of Criticism," as ridiculous as possible, but every one illustrated by authentic examples, drawn from the labours of our new Stagirite.[178] At length, when the public had decided on the fact of Warburton's edition, it was confessed that the editor's design had never been to explain Shakspeare! and that he was even conscious he had frequently imputed to the poet meanings which he never thought! Our critic's great object was to display his own learning! Warburton wrote for Warburton, and not for Shakspeare! and the literary imposture almost rivals the confessions of Lander or Psalmanazar! The same SECRET PRINCIPLE was pursued in his absurd edition of Pope. He formed an unbroken Commentary on the "Essay on Criticism," to show that that admirable collection of precepts had been constructed by a systematical method, which it is well known the poet never designed; and the same instruments of torture were here used as in the "Essay on Man," to reconcile a system of fatalism to the doctrines of Revelation.[179] Warton had to remove the incumbrance of his Commentaries on Pope, while a most laborious confederacy zealously performed the same task to relieve Shakspeare. Thus Warburton pursued ONE SECRET PRINCIPLE in all his labours; thus he raised edifices which could not be securely inhabited, and were only impediments in the roadway; and these works are now known by the labours of those who have exerted their skill in laying them in ruins. Warburton was probably aware that the SECRET PRINCIPLE which regulated his public opinions might lay him open, at numerous points, to the strokes of ridicule. It is a weapon which every one is willing to use, but which seems to terrify every one when it is pointed against themselves. There is no party or sect which have not employed it in their most serious controversies: the grave part of mankind protest against it, often at the moment they have been directing it for their own purpose. And the inquiry, whether ridicule be a test of truth, is one of the large controversies in our own literature. It was opened by Lord Shaftesbury, and zealously maintained by his school. Akenside, in a note to his celebrated poem, asserts the efficacy of ridicule as a test of truth: Lord Kaimes had just done the same. Warburton levelled his piece at the lord in the bush-fighting of a note; but came down in the open field with a full discharge of his artillery on the luckless bard.[180] Warburton designates Akenside under the sneering appellative of "The Poet," and alluding to his "sublime account" of the use of ridicule, insultingly reminds him of "his Master," Shaftesbury, and of that school which made morality an object of taste, shrewdly hinting that Akenside was "a man of taste;" a new term, as we are to infer from Warburton, for "a Deist;" or, as Akenside had alluded to Spinoza, he might be something worse. The great critic loudly protested against the practice of ridicule; but, in attacking its advocate, he is himself an evidence of its efficacy, by keenly ridiculing "the Poet" and his opinions. Dyson, the patron of Akenside, nobly stepped forwards to rescue his Eagle, panting in the tremendous gripe of the critical Lion. His defence of Akenside is an argumentative piece of criticism on the nature of ridicule, curious, but wanting the graces of the genius who inspired it.[181] I shall stop one moment, since it falls into our subject, to record this great literary battle on the use of ridicule, which has been fought till both parties, after having shed their ink, divide the field without victory or defeat, and now stand looking on each other. The advocates for the use of RIDICULE maintain that it is a natural sense or feeling, bestowed on us for wise purposes by the Supreme Being, as are the other feelings of beauty and of sublimity;--the sense of beauty to detect the deformity, as the sense of ridicule the absurdity of an object: and they further maintain, that no real virtues, such as wisdom, honesty, bravery, or generosity, can be ridiculed. The great Adversary of Ridicule replied that they did not dare to ridicule the virtues openly; but, by overcharging and distorting them they could laugh at leisure. "Give them other names," he says, "call them but Temerity, Prodigality, Simplicity, &c., and your business is done. Make them ridiculous, and you may go on, in the freedom of wit and humour (as Shaftesbury distinguishes ridicule), till there be never a virtue left to laugh out of countenance." The ridiculers acknowledge that their favourite art may do mischief, when dishonest men obtrude circumstances foreign to the object. But, they justly urge, that the use of reason itself is full as liable to the same objection: grant Spinoza his false premises, and his conclusions will be considered as true. Dyson threw out an ingenious illustration. "It is so equally in the mathematics; where, in reasoning about a circle, if we join along with its real properties others that do not belong to it, our conclusions will certainly be erroneous. Yet who would infer from hence that the manner of proof is defective or fallacious?" Warburton urged the strongest case against the use of ridicule, in that of Socrates and Aristophanes. In his strong and coarse illustration he shows, that "by clapping a fool's coat on the most immaculate virtue, it stuck on Socrates like a San Benito, and at last brought him to his execution: it made the owner resemble his direct opposite; that character he was most unlike. The consequences are well known." Warburton here adopted the popular notion, that the witty buffoon Aristophanes was the occasion of the death of the philosopher Socrates. The defence is skilful on the part of Dyson; and we may easily conceive that on so important a point Akenside had been consulted. I shall give it in his own words:-- "The Socrates of Aristophanes is as truly ridiculous a character as ever was drawn; but it is not the character of Socrates himself. The object was perverted, and the mischief which ensued was owing to the dishonesty of him who persuaded the people that that was the real character of Socrates, not from any error in the faculty of ridicule itself."--Dyson then states the fact as it concerned Socrates. "The real intention of the contrivers of this ridicule was not so much to mislead the people, by giving them a bad opinion of Socrates, as to sound what was at the time the general opinion of him, that from thence they might judge whether it would be safe to bring a direct accusation against him. The most effectual way of making this trial was by ridiculing him; for they knew, if the people saw his character in its true light, they would be displeased with the misrepresentation, and not endure the ridicule. On trial this appeared: the play met with its deserved fate; and, notwithstanding the exquisiteness of the wit, was absolutely rejected. A second attempt succeeded no better; and the abettors of the poet were so discouraged from pursuing their design against Socrates, that it was not till ABOVE TWENTY YEARS after the publication of the play that they brought their accusation against him! It was not, therefore, ridicule that did, or could destroy Socrates: he was rather sacrificed for the right use of it himself, against the Sophists, who could not bear the test." Thus, then, stands the argument.--Warburton, reasoning on the abuses of ridicule, has opened to us all its dangers. Its advocate concedes that Ridicule, to be a test of Truth, must not impose on us circumstances which are foreign to the object. No object can be ridiculed that is not ridiculous. Should this happen, then the ridicule is false; and, as such, can be proved as much as any piece of false reasoning. We may therefore conclude, that ridicule is a taste of congruity and propriety not possessed by every one; a test which separates truth from imposture; a talent against the exercise of which most men are interested to protest; but which, being founded on the constituent principles of the human mind, is often indulged at the very moment it is decried and complained of. But we must not leave this great man without some notice of that peculiar style of controversy which he adopted, and which may be distinguished among our LITERARY QUARRELS. He has left his name to a school--a school which the more liberal spirit of the day we live in would not any longer endure. Who has not heard of THE WARBURTONIANS? That SECRET PRINCIPLE which directed Warburton in all his works, and which we have attempted to pursue, could not of itself have been sufficient to have filled the world with the name of Warburton. Other scholars have published reveries, and they have passed away, after showing themselves for a time, leaving no impression; like those coloured and shifting shadows on a wall, with which children are amused; but Warburton was a literary Revolutionist, who, to maintain a new order of things, exercised all the despotism of a perpetual dictator. The bold unblushing energy which could lay down the most extravagant positions, was maintained by a fierce dogmatic spirit, and by a peculiar style of mordacious contempt and intolerant insolence, beating down his opponents from all quarters with an animating shout of triumph, to encourage those more serious minds, who, overcome by his genius, were yet often alarmed by the ambiguous tendency of his speculations.[182] The Warburtonian School was to be supported by the most licentious principles; by dictatorial arrogance,[183] by gross invective, and by airy sarcasm;[184] the bitter contempt which, with its many little artifices, lowers an adversary in the public opinion, was more peculiarly the talent of one of the aptest scholars, the cool, the keen, the sophistical Hurd. The lowest arts of confederacy were connived at by all the disciples,[185] prodigal of praise to themselves, and retentive of it to all others; the world was to be divided into two parts, the Warburtonians and the Anti. To establish this new government in the literary world, this great Revolutionist was favoured by Fortune with two important aids; the one was a Machine, by which he could wield public opinion; and the other a Man, who seemed born to be his minister or his viceroy. The machine was nothing less than the immortal works of Pope; as soon as Warburton had obtained a royal patent to secure to himself the sole property of Pope's works, the public were compelled, under the disguise of a Commentary on the most classical of our Poets, to be concerned with all his literary quarrels, and have his libels and lampoons perpetually before them; all the foul waters of his anger were deposited here as in a common reservoir.[186] Fanciful as was the genius of Warburton, it delighted too much in its eccentric motions, and in its own solitary greatness, amid abstract and recondite topics, to have strongly attracted the public attention, had not a party been formed around him, at the head of which stood the active and subtle Hurd; and amid the gradations of the votive brotherhood, the profound BALGUY,[187] the spirited BROWN,[188] till we descend--
Such, then, was WARBURTON, and such the quarrels of this great author. He was, through his literary life, an adventurer, guided by that secret principle which opened an immediate road to fame. By opposing the common sentiments of mankind, he awed and he commanded them; and by giving a new face to all things, he surprised, by the appearances of discoveries. All this, so pleasing to his egotism, was not, however, fortunate for his ambition. To sustain an authority which he had usurped; to substitute for the taste he wanted a curious and dazzling erudition; and to maintain those reckless decisions which so often plunged him into perils, Warburton adopted his system of Literary Quarrels. These were the illegitimate means which raised a sudden celebrity, and which genius kept alive, as long as that genius lasted; but Warburton suffered that literary calamity, too protracted a period of human life: he outlived himself and his fame. This great and original mind sacrificed all his genius to that secret principle we have endeavoured to develope--it was a self-immolation! The learned SELDEN, in the curious little volume of his "Table-Talk," has delivered to posterity a precept for the learned, which they ought to wear, like the Jewish phylacteries, as "a frontlet between their eyes." No man is the wiser for his learning: it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man. Sir THOMAS HANMER, who was well acquainted with Warburton, during their correspondence about Shakspeare, often said of him:--"The only use he could find in Mr. Warburton was starting the game; he was not to be trusted in running it down." A just discrimination! His fervid curiosity was absolutely creative; but his taste and his judgment, perpetually stretched out by his system, could not save him from even inglorious absurdities! Warburton, it is probable, was not really the character he appears. It mortifies the lovers of genius to discover how a natural character may be thrown into a convulsed unnatural state by some adopted system: it is this system, which, carrying it, as it were, beyond itself, communicates a more than natural, but a self-destroying energy. All then becomes reversed! The arrogant and vituperative Warburton was only such in his assumed character; for in still domestic life he was the creature of benevolence, touched by generous passions. But in public life the artificial or the acquired character prevails over the one which nature designed for us; and by that all public men, as well as authors, are usually judged by posterity.
[141] One of his lively adversaries, the author of the "Canons of Criticism," observed the difficulty of writing against an author whose reputation so much exceeded the knowledge of his works. "It is my misfortune," says EDWARDS, "in this controversy, to be engaged with a person who is better known by his name than his works; or, to speak more properly, whose works are more known than read."--Preface to the Canons of Criticism. [142] Aristotle's Rhetoric, B. III. c. 16. [143] The materials for a "Life of Warburton" have been arranged by Mr. NICHOLS with his accustomed fidelity.--See his Literary Anecdotes. [144] It is probable I may have drawn my meteor from our volcanic author himself, who had his lucid moments, even in the deliriums of his imagination. Warburton has rightly observed, in his "Divine Legation," p. 203, that "Systems, Schemes, and Hypotheses, all bred of heat, in the warm regions of Controversy, like meteors in a troubled sky, have each its turn to blaze and fly away." [145] It seems, even by the confession of a Warburtonian, that his master was of "a human size;" for when Bishop LOWTH rallies the Warburtonians for their subserviency and credulity to their master, he aimed a gentle stroke at Dr. BROWN, who, in his "Essays on the Characteristics," had poured forth the most vehement panegyric. In his "Estimate of Manners of the Times," too, after a long tirade of their badness in regard to taste and learning, he thus again eulogizes his mighty master:--"Himself is abused, and his friends insulted for his sake, by those who never read his writings; or, if they did, could neither taste nor comprehend them; while every little aspiring or despairing scribbler eyes him as Cassius did Cæsar: and whispers to his fellow--
On this Lowth observes, that "this Lord Paramount in his pretensions doth bestride the narrow world of literature, and has cast out his shoe over all the regions of science." This leads to a ludicrous comparison of Warburton, with King Pichrochole and his three ministers, who, in URQUHART'S admirable version of the French wit, are Count Merdaille, the Duke of Smalltrash, and the Earl Swashbuckler, who set up for universal monarchy, and made an imaginary expedition through all the quarters of the world, as Rabelais records, and the bishop facetiously quotes. Dr. Brown afterwards seemed to repent his panegyric, and contrives to make his gigantic hero shrink into a moderate size. "I believe still, every little aspiring fellow continues thus to eye him. For myself, I have ever considered him as a man, yet considerable among his species, as the following part of the paragraph clearly demonstrates. I speak of him here as a Gulliver indeed; yet still of no more than human size, and only apprehended to be of colossal magnitude by certain of his Lilliputian enemies." Thus subtilely would poor Dr. Brown save appearances! It must be confessed that, in a dilemma, never was a giant got rid of so easily!--The plain truth, however, was, that Brown was then on the point of quarrelling with Warburton; for he laments, in a letter to a friend, that "he had not avoided all personal panegyric. I had thus saved myself the trouble of setting right a character which I far over-painted." A part of this letter is quoted in the "Biographia Britannica." [146] "Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the collections of their respective works," itself a collection which our shelves could ill spare, though maliciously republished by Dr. PARR. The dedication by Parr stands unparalleled for comparative criticism. It is the eruption of a volcano; it sparkles, it blazes, and scatters light and destruction. How deeply ought we to regret that this Nazarite suffered his strength to be shorn by the Delilahs of spurious fame. Never did this man, with his gifted strength, grasp the pillars of a temple, to shake its atoms over Philistines; but pleased the childlike simplicity of his mind by pulling down houses over the heads of their unlucky inhabitants. He consumed, in local and personal literary quarrels, a genius which might have made the next age his own. With all the stores of erudition, and all the eloquence of genius, he mortified a country parson for his politics, and a London accoucheur for certain obstetrical labours performed on Horace; and now his collected writings lie before us, volumes unsaleable and unread. His insatiate vanity was so little delicate, as often to snatch its sweetmeat from a foul plate; it now appears, by the secret revelations in Griffith's own copy of his "Monthly Review," that the writer of a very elaborate article on the works of Dr. Parr, was no less a personage than the Doctor himself. His egotism was so declamatory, that it unnaturalized a great mind, by the distortions of Johnsonian mimicry; his fierceness, which was pushed on to brutality on the unresisting, retreated with a child's terrors when resisted; and the pomp of petty pride in table triumphs and evening circles, ill compensated for the lost century he might have made his own!
[148] When Warburton, sore at having been refused academical honours at Oxford, which were offered to Pope, then his fellow-traveller, and who, in consequence of this refusal, did himself not accept them--in his controversy with Lowth (then the Oxford Professor), gave way to his angry spirit, and struck at the University itself, for its political jesuitism, being a place where men "were taught to distinguish between de facto and de jure," caustic was the retort. Lowth, by singular felicity of application, touched on Warburton's original designation, in a character he hit on in Clarendon. After remonstrating with spirit and dignity on this petulant attack, which was not merely personal, Lowth continues:--"Had I not your lordship's example to justify me, I should think it a piece of extreme impertinence to inquire where YOU were bred; though one might justly plead, in excuse for it, a natural curiosity to know where and how such a phenomenon was produced. It is commonly said that your lordship's education was of that particular kind, concerning which it is a remark of that great judge of men and manners, Lord Clarendon (on whom you have, therefore, with a wonderful happiness of allusion, justness of application, and elegance of expression, conferred 'the unrivalled title of the Chancellor of Human Nature'), that it peculiarly disposes men to be proud, insolent, and pragmatical." Lowth, in a note, inserts Clarendon's character of Colonel Harrison: "He had been bred up in the place of a clerk, under a lawyer of good account in those parts; which kind of education introduces men into the language and practice of business; and if it be not resisted by the great ingenuity of the person, inclines young men to more pride than any other kind of breeding, and disposes them to be pragmatical and insolent." "Now, my lord (Lowth continues), as you have in your whole behaviour, and in all your writings, remarkably distinguished yourself by your humility, lenity, meekness, forbearance, candour, humanity, civility, decency, good manners, good temper, moderation with regard to the opinions of others, and a modest diffidence of your own, this unpromising circumstance of your education is so far from being a disgrace to you, that it highly redounds to your praise."--Lowth's Letter to the Author of the D. L. p. 63. Was ever weapon more polished and keen? This Attic style of controversy finely contrasts with the tasteless and fierce invective of the Warburtonians, although one of them is well known to have managed too adroitly the cutting instrument of irony; but the frigid malignancy of Hurd diminishes the pleasure we might find in his skill. Warburton ill concealed his vexation in the contempt he vented in a letter to Hurd on this occasion. "All you say about Lowth's pamphlet breathes the purest spirit of friendship. His wit and his reasoning, God knows, and I also, (as a certain critic said once in a matter of the like great importance), are much below the qualities that deserve those names."--He writes too of "this man's boldness in publishing his letters."--"If he expects an answer, he will certainly find himself disappointed; though I believe I could make as good sport with this devil of a vice, for the public diversion, as ever was made with him in the old Moralities."--But Warburton did reply! Had he ever possessed one feeling of taste, never would he have figured the elegant Lowth as this grotesque personage. He was, however, at that moment sharply stung! This circumstance of Attorneyship was not passed over in Mallet's "Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living." Comparing, in the Spirit of "familiarity," Arnall, an impudent scribbling attorney and political scribe, with Warburton, he says, "You have been an attorney as well as he, but a little more impudent than he was; for Arnall never presumed to conceal his turpitude under the gown and the scarf." But this is mere invective! [149] I have given a tempered opinion of his motive for this sudden conversion from Attorneyship to Divinity; for it must not be concealed, in our inquiry into Warburton's character, that he has frequently been accused of a more worldly one. He was so fierce an advocate for some important causes he undertook, that his sincerity has been liable to suspicion; the pleader, in some points, certainly acting the part of a sophist. Were we to decide by the early appearances of his conduct, by the rapid change of his profession, by his obsequious servility to his country squire, and by what have been termed the hazardous "fooleries in criticism, and outrages in controversy," which he systematically pursued, he looks like one not in earnest; and more zealous to maintain the character of his own genius, than the cause he had espoused. Leland once exclaimed, "What are we to think of the writer and his intentions? Is he really sincere in his reasonings?" Certain it is, his paradoxes often alarmed his friends, to repeat the words of a great critic, by "the absurdity of his criticism, the heterodoxy of his tenets, and the brutality of his invectives." Our Juvenal, who, whatever might be the vehemence of his declamation, reflected always those opinions which floated about him, has drawn a full-length figure. He accounts for Warburton's early motive in taking the cassock, as being
Dr. Parr is indignant at such surmises; but the feeling is more honourable than the decision! In an admirable character of Warburton in the "Westminster Magazine" for 1779, it is acknowledged, "at his outset in life he was suspected of being inclined to infidelity; and it was not till many years had elapsed, that the orthodoxy of his opinions was generally assented to." On this Dr. Parr observes, "Why Dr. Warburton was ever suspected of secret infidelity I know not. What he was inclined to think on subjects of religion, before, perhaps, he had leisure or ability to examine them, depends only upon obscure surmise, or vague report." The words inclined to think seems a periphrase for secret infidelity. Our critic attributes these reports to "an English dunce, whose blunders and calumnies are now happily forgotten, and repeated by a French buffoon, whose morality is not commensurate with his wit."--Tracts by Warburton, &c., p. 186. "The English Dunce" I do not recollect; of this sort there are so many! Voltaire is "the French buffoon;" who, indeed, compares Warburton in his bishopric, to Peachum in the Beggar's Opera--who, as Keeper of Newgate, was for hanging all his old accomplices! [150] Warburton was far more extravagant in a later attempt which he made to expound the odd visions of a crack-brained Welshman, a prophesying knave; a knave by his own confession, and a prophet by Warburton's. This commentary, inserted in Jortin's "Remarks on Ecclesiastical History," considerably injured the reputation of Jortin. The story of Warburton and his Welsh Prophet would of itself be sufficient to detect the shiftings and artifices of his genius. RICE or ARISE EVANS! was one of the many prophets who rose up in Oliver's fanatical days; and Warburton had the hardihood to insert, in Jortin's learned work, a strange commentary to prove that Arise Evans, in Cromwell's time, in his "Echo from Heaven," had manifestly prophesied the Hanoverian Succession! The Welshman was a knave by his own account in subscribing with his right hand the confession he calls his prophecy, before a justice, and with his left, that which was his recantation, signed before the recorder, adding, "I know the bench and the people thought I recanted; but, alas! they were deceived;" and this Warburton calls "an uncommon fetch of wit," to save the truth of the prophecy, though not the honour of the prophet. If Evans meant anything, he meant what was then floating in all men's minds, the probable restoration of the Stuarts. By this prelude of that inventive genius which afterwards commented, in the same spirit, on the Æneid of Virgil, and the "Divine Legation, itself," and made the same sort of discoveries, he fixed himself in this dilemma: either Warburton was a greater impostor than Arise Evans, or he was more credulous than even any follower of the Welsh prophet, if he really had any. But the truth is, that Warburton was always writing for a present purpose, and believed, and did not believe, as it happened. "Ordinary men believe one side of a contradiction at a time, whereas his lordship" (says his admirable antagonist) "frequently believes, or at least defends both. So that it would have been no great wonder if he should maintain that Evans was both a real prophet and an impostor." Yet this is not the only awkward attitude into which Warburton has here thrown himself. To strain the vision of the raving Welshman to events of which he could have no notion, Warburton has plunged into the most ludicrous difficulties, all which ended, as all his discoveries have done, in making the fortune of an adversary who, like the Momus of Homer, has raised through the skies "inextinguishable laughter," in the amusing tract of "Confusion worse Confounded, Rout on Rout, or the Bishop of G----'s Commentary on Arise Evans; by Indignatio," 1772. The writer was the learned Henry Taylor, the author of Ben Mordecai's Apology. [151] The correct taste of Lowth with some humour describes the last sentence of the "Enquiry on Prodigies" as "the Musa Pedestris got on horseback in a high prancing style." He printed it in measured lines, without, however, changing the place of a single word, and it produced blank verse. Thus it reads--
[152] When Warburton was considered as a Colossus of literature, RALPH, the political writer, pointed a severe allusion to the awkward figure he makes in these Dedications. "The Colossus himself creeps between the legs of the late Sir Robert Sutton; in what posture, or for what purpose, need not be explained." CHURCHILL has not passed by unnoticed Warburton's humility, even to weakness, combined with pride which could rise to haughtiness.
Yet this man ----"Fawned through all his life
His dedication to the plain unlettered Ralph Allen of Bath, his greatest of patrons, of his "Commentary on Pope's Essay on Man," is written in the same spirit as those to Sir Robert Sutton; but the former unlucky gentleman was more publicly exposed by it. The subject of this dedication turns on "the growth and progress of Fate, divided into four principal branches!" There is an episode about Free-will and Nature and Grace, and "a contrivance of Leibnitz about Fatalism." Ralph Allen was a good Quaker-like man, but he must have lost his temper if he ever read the dedication! Let us not, however, imagine that Warburton was at all insensible to this violation of literary decorum; he only sacrificed propriety to what he considered a more urgent principle--his own personal interest. No one had a juster conception of the true nature of dedications; for he says in the famous one "to the Free-thinkers:"--"I could never approve the custom of dedicating books to men whose professions made them strangers to the subject. A Discourse on the Ten Predicaments to a Leader of Armies, or a System of Casuistry to a Minister of State, always appeared to me a high absurdity." All human characters are mixed--true! yet still we feel indignant to discover some of the greatest often combining the most opposite qualities; and then they are not so much mixed as the parts are naturally joined together. Could one imagine that so lofty a character as Warburton could have been liable to have incurred even the random stroke of the satirist? whether true or false, the events of his life, better known at this day than in his own, will show. Churchill says that
[153] The palace here alluded to is fully described in a volume of "Travels through Sicily and Malta," by P. Brydone, F.R.S., in 1770. He describes it as belonging to "the Prince of Palermo, a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry." He tells us this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, "not one made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of every other animal to the bodies of men. Sometimes he makes a compound of five or six animals that have no sort of resemblance in nature. He puts the head of a lion on the neck of a goose, the body of a lizard, the legs of a goat, the tail of a fox; on the back of this monster he puts another, if possible still more hideous, with five or six heads, and a bush of horns. There is no kind of horn in the world he has not collected, and his pleasure is to see them all flourishing upon the same head." The interior of the house was decorated in the same monstrous style, and the description, unique of its kind, occupies several pages of Mr. Brydone's book.--ED. [154] This letter was written in 1726, and first found by Dr. Knight in 1750, in fitting up a house where Concanen had probably lodged. It was suppressed, till Akenside, in 1766, printed it in a sixpenny pamphlet, entitled "An Ode to Mr. Edwards." He preserved the curiosity, with "all its peculiarities of grammar, spelling, and punctuation." The insulted poet took a deep revenge for the contemptuous treatment he had received from the modern Stagirite. The "peculiarities" betray most evident marks of the self-taught lawyer; the orthography and the double letters were minted in the office. [Thus he speaks of Addison as this "exact Mr. of propriety," and of his own studies of the English poets "to trace them to their sources; and observe what oar, as well as what slime and gravel they brought down with them."] When I looked for the letter in Akenside's Works, I discovered that it had been silently dropped. Some interest, doubtless, had been made to suppress it, for Warburton was humbled when reminded of it. Malone, fortunately, has preserved it in his Shakspeare, where it may be found, in a place not likely to be looked into for it, at the close of Julius Cæsar: this literary curiosity had otherwise been lost for posterity; its whole history is a series of wonderful escapes. By this document we became acquainted with the astonishing fact, that Warburton, early in life, was himself one of those very dunces whom he has so unmercifully registered in their Doomsday-book; one who admired the genius of his brothers, and spoke of Pope with the utmost contempt! [Thus he says, "Dryden, I observe, borrows for want of leisure, and Pope for want of genius!"]
"When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood
[156] Such opposite studies shot themselves into the most fantastical forms in his rocket-writings, whether they streamed in "The Divine Legation," or sparkled in "The Origin of Romances," or played about in giving double senses to Virgil, Pope, and Shakspeare. CHURCHILL, with a good deal of ill-nature and some truth, describes them:--
The Warburtonians seemed to consider his great work, as the Bible by which all literary men were to be sworn. LOWTH ridicules their credulity. "'The Divine Legation,' it seems, contains in it all knowledge, divine and human, ancient and modern: it is a perfect Encyclopædia, including all history, criticism, divinity, law, politics, from the law of Moses down to the Jew bill, and from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern Rebus-writing, &c." "In the 2014 pages of the unfinished 'Divine Legation,'" observes the sarcastic GIBBON, "four hundred authors are quoted, from St. Austin down to Scarron and Rabelais!" Yet, after all that satire and wit have denounced, listen to an enlightened votary of Warburton. He asserts that "The 'Divine Legation' has taken its place at the head, not to say of English theology, but almost of English literature. To the composition of this prodigious performance, HOOKER and STILLINGFLEET could have contributed the erudition, CHILLINGWORTH and LOCKE the acuteness, TAYLOR an imagination even more wild and copious, SWIFT, and perhaps, EACHARD, the sarcastic vein of wit; but what power of understanding, except WARBURTON'S, could first have amassed all these materials, and then compacted them into a bulky and elaborate work, so consistent and harmonious."--Quarterly Review. vol. vii. [157] "The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated," vol. i. sec. iv. Observe the remarkable expression, "that last foible of superior genius." He had evidently running in his mind Milton's line on Fame--
[158] The author of "The Canons of Criticism" addressed a severe sonnet to Warburton; and alludes to the "Alliance":--
[159] "Monthly Review," vol. xvi. p. 324, the organ of the dissenters. [160] See article HOBBES, for his system. The great Selden was an Erastian; a distinction extremely obscure. Erastus was a Swiss physician of little note, who was for restraining the ecclesiastical power from all temporal jurisdiction. Selden did him the honour of adopting his principles. Selden wrote against the divine right of tithes, but allowed the legal right, which gave at first great offence to the clergy, who afterwards perceived the propriety of his argument, as Wotton has fully acknowledged. [161] It does not always enter into the design of these volumes to examine those great works which produced literary quarrels. But some may be glad to find here a word on this original project. The grand position of the Divine Legation is, that the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, or a future state of reward and punishment, is absolutely necessary in the moral government of the universe. The author shows how it has been inculcated by all good legislators, so that no religion could ever exist without it; but the Jewish could, from its peculiar government, which was theocracy--a government where the presence of God himself was perpetually manifested by miracles and new ordinances: and hence temporal rewards and punishments were sufficient for that people, to whom the unity and power of the Godhead were never doubtful. As he proceeded, he would have opened a new argument, viz., that the Jewish religion was only the part of a revelation, showing the necessity of a further one for its completion, which produced Christianity. When Warburton was in good spirits with his great work (for he was not always so), he wrote thus to a friend:--"You judge right, that the next volume of the D. L. will not be the last. I thought I had told you that I had divided the work into three parts: the first gives you a view of Paganism; the second, of Judaism; and the third, of Christianity. You will wonder how this last inquiry can come into so simple an argument as that which I undertake to enforce. I have not room to tell you more than this--that after I have proved a future state not to be, in fact in the Mosaic dispensation, I next show that, if Christianity be true, it could not possibly be there; and this necessitates me to explain the nature of Christianity, with which the whole ends. But this inter nos. If it be known, I should possibly have somebody writing against this part too before it appears."--Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," vol. v. p. 551. Thus he exults in the true tone, and with all the levity of a sophist. It is well that a true feeling of religion does not depend on the quirks and quibbles of human reasonings, or, what are as fallible, on masses of fanciful erudition. [162] Warburton lost himself in the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed. This work harassed his days and exhausted his intellect. Observe the tortures of a mind, even of so great a mind as that of Warburton's, when it sacrifices all to the perishable vanity of sudden celebrity. Often he flew from his task in utter exhaustion and despair. He had quitted the smooth and even line of truth, to wind about and split himself on all the crookedness of paradoxes. He paints his feelings in a letter to Birch. He says--"I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month and year to year." He had recourse to "an expedient;" which was, "to set the press on work, and so oblige himself to supply copy." Such is the confession of the author of the "Divine Legation!" this "encyclopædia" of all ancient and modern lore--all to proceed from "a simple argument!" But when he describes his sufferings, hard is the heart of that literary man who cannot sympathise with such a giant caught in the toils! I give his words:--"Distractions of various kinds, inseparable from human life, joined with a naturally melancholy habit, contribute greatly to increase my indolence. This makes my reading wild and desultory; and I seek refuge from the uneasiness of thought, from any book, let it be what it will. By my manner of writing upon subjects, you would naturally imagine they afford me pleasure, and attach me thoroughly. I will assure you, No!"--Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," vol. v. p. 562. Warburton had not the cares of a family--they were merely literary ones. The secret cause of his "melancholy," and his "indolence," and that "want of attachment and pleasure to his subjects;" which his friends "naturally imagined" afforded him so much, was the controversies he had kindled, and the polemical battles he had raised about him. However boldly he attacked in return, his heart often sickened in privacy; for how often must he have beheld his noble and his whimsical edifices built on sands, which the waters were perpetually eating into! At the last interview of Warburton with Pope, the dying poet exhorted him to proceed with "The Divine Legation." "Your reputation," said he, "as well as your duty, is concerned in it. People say you can get no farther in your proof. Nay, Lord Bolingbroke himself bids me expect no such thing." This anecdote is rather extraordinary; for it appears in "Owen Ruffhead's Life of Pope," p. 497, a work written under the eye of Warburton himself; and in which I think I could point out some strong touches from his own hand on certain important occasions, when he would not trust to the creeping dulness of Ruffhead. [163] His temerity had raised against him not only infidels, but Christians. If any pious clergyman now wrote in favour of the opinion that God's people believed in the immortality of the soul--which can we doubt they did? and which Menasseh Ben Israel has written his treatise, "De Resurrectione Mortuorum," to prove--it was a strange sight to behold a bishop seeming to deny so rational and religious a creed! Even Dr. Balguy confessed to Warburton, that "there was one thing in the argument of the 'Divine Legation' that stuck more with candid men than all the rest--how a religion without a future state could be worthy of God!" This Warburton promised to satisfy, by a fresh appendix. His volatile genius, however, was condemned to "the pelting of a merciless storm." Lowth told him--"You give yourself out as demonstrator of the divine legation of Moses; it has been often demonstrated before; a young student in theology might undertake to give a better--that is, a more satisfactory and irrefragable demonstration of it in five pages than you have done in five volumes."--Lowth's "Letter to Warburton," p. 12. [164] Hurd was the son of a Staffordshire farmer, and was placed by him at Rugely, from whence he was removed to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-six he published a pamphlet entitled "Remarks on a late Book entitled 'An Inquiry into the Rejection of the Christian Miracles by the Heathens, by William Weston,'" which met with considerable attention. In 1749, on the occasion of publishing a commentary on Horace's "Ars Poetica," he complimented Warburton so strongly as to ensure his favour. Warburton returned it by a puff for Hurd in his edition of Pope, and the two became fast friends. It was a profitable connexion to Hurd, for by the intercession of Warburton he was appointed one of the Whitehall preachers, a preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and Archdeacon of Gloucester. He repaid Warburton by constant praises in print, and so far succeeded with that vain man, that when he read the dedication he made to him of his "Commentary on the Epistle to Augustus," he wrote to him with mock humility--"I will confess to you how much satisfaction the groundless part of it, that which relates to myself, gave me." When Dr. Jortin very properly spoke of Warburton with less of subserviency than the overbearing bishop desired, Hurd at once came forward to fight for Warburton in print, in a satirical treatise on "The Delicacy of Friendship," which highly delighted his patron, who at once wrote to Dr. Lowth, stating him to be "a man of very superior talents, of genius, learning, and virtue; indeed, a principal ornament of the age he lives in." Hurd was made Bishop of Lichfield in 1775, and of Winchester in 1779. He died in the year 1808.--ED. [165] The Attic irony was translated into plain English, in "Remarks on Dr. Warburton's Account of the Sentiments of the Early Jews," 1757; and the following rules for all who dissented from Warburton are deduced:--"You must not write on the same subject that he does. You must not glance at his arguments, even without naming him or so much as referring to him. If you find his reasonings ever so faulty, you must not presume to furnish him with better of your own, even though you prove, and are desirous to support his conclusions. When you design him a compliment, you must express it in full form, and with all the circumstance of panegyrical approbation, without impertinently qualifying your civilities by assigning a reason why you think he deserves them, as this might possibly be taken for a hint that you know something of the matter he is writing about as well as himself. You must never call any of his discoveries by the name of conjectures, though you allow them their full proportion of elegance, learning, &c.; for you ought to know that this capital genius never proposed anything to the judgment of the public (though ever so new and uncommon) with diffidence in his life. Thus stands the decree prescribing our demeanour towards this sovereign in the Republic of Letters, as we find it promulged, and bearing date at the palace of Lincoln's Inn, Nov. 25, 1755."--From whence Hurd's "Seventh Dissertation" was dated. [166] Gibbon's "Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of the Æneid." Dr. Parr considers this clear, elegant, and decisive work of criticism, as a complete refutation of Warburton's discovery. [167] It is curious enough to observe that Warburton himself, acknowledging this to be a paradox, exultingly exclaims, "Which, like so many others I have had the ODD FORTUNE to advance, will be seen to be only another name for Truth." This has all the levity of a sophist's language! Hence we must infer that some of the most important subjects could not be understood and defended, but by Warburton's "odd fortune!" It was this levity of ideas that raised a suspicion that he was not always sincere. He writes, in a letter, of "living in mere spite, to rub another volume of the 'Divine Legation' in the noses of bigots and zealots." He employs the most ludicrous images, and the coarsest phrases, on the most solemn subjects. In one of his most unlucky paradoxes with Lowth, on the age and style of the writings of Job, he accuses that elegant scholar of deficient discernment; and, in respect to style, as not "distinguishing partridge from horseflesh;" and in quoting some of the poetical passages, of "paying with an old song," and "giving rhyme for reason." Alluding to some one of his adversaries, whom he calls "the weakest, as well as the wickedest of all mankind," he employs a striking image--"I shall hang him and his fellows, as they do vermin in a warren, and leave them to posterity, to stink and blacken in the wind." [168] Warburton, in this work (the "Doctrine of Grace,") has a curious passage, too long to quote, where he observes, that "The Indian and Asiatic eloquence was esteemed hyperbolic and puerile by the more phlegmatic inhabitants of Rome and Athens: and the Western eloquence, in its turn, frigid or insipid, to the hardy and inflamed imaginations of the East. The same expression, which in one place had the utmost simplicity, had in another the utmost sublime." The jackal, too, echoes the roar of the lion; for the polished Hurd, whose taste was far more decided than Warburton's, was bold enough to add, in his Letter to Leland, "That which is thought supremely elegant in one country, passes in another for finical; while what in this country is accepted under the idea of sublimity, is derided in that other as no better than bombast." So unsettled were the no-taste of Warburton, and the prim-taste of Hurd! [169] The Letter to Leland is characterised in the "Critical Review" for April, 1765, as the work of "a preferment-hunting toad-eater, who, while his patron happened to go out of his depth, tells him that he is treading good ground; but at the same time offers him the use of a cork-jacket to keep him above water." [170] Dr. Thomas Leland was born in Dublin in 1722, and was educated in Trinity College, in that city. Having obtained a Fellowship there, he depended on that alone, and devoted a long life to study, and the production of various historical and theological works; as well as a "History of Ireland," published in 1773. He died in 1785.--ED. [171] In a rough attack on Warburton, respecting Pope's privately printing 1500 copies of the "Patriot King" of Bolingbroke, which I conceive to have been written by Mallet, I find a particular account of the manner in which the "Essay on Man" was written, over which Johnson seems to throw great doubts. The writer of this angry epistle, in addressing Warburton, says: "If you were as intimate with Mr. Pope as you pretend, you must know the truth of a fact which several others, as well as I, who never had the honour of a personal acquaintance with Lord Bolingbroke or Mr. Pope, have heard. The fact was related to me by a certain Senior Fellow of one of our Universities, who was very intimate with Mr. Pope. He started some objections, one day, at Mr. Pope's house, to the doctrine contained in the Ethic Epistles: upon which Mr. Pope told him that he would soon convince him of the truth of it, by laying the argument at large before him; for which purpose he gave him a large prose manuscript to peruse, telling him, at the same time, the author's name. From this perusal, whatever other conviction the doctor might receive, he collected at least this: that Mr. Pope had from his friend not only the doctrine, but even the finest and strongest ornaments of his Ethics. Now, if this fact be true (as I question not but you know it to be so), I believe no man of candour will attribute such merit to Mr. Pope as you would insinuate, for acknowledging the wisdom and the friendship of the man who was his instructor in philosophy; nor consequently that this acknowledgment, and the dedication of his own system, put into a poetical dress by Mr. Pope, laid his lordship under the necessity of never resenting any injury done to him by the poet afterwards. Mr. Pope told no more than literal truth, in calling Lord Bolingbroke his guide, philosopher, and friend." The existence of this very manuscript volume was authenticated by Lord Bathurst, in a conversation with Dr. Blair and others, where he said, "he had read the MS. in Lord Bolingbroke's handwriting, and was at a loss whether most to admire the elegance of Lord Bolingbroke's prose, or the beauty of Mr. Pope's verse."--See the letter of Dr. Blair in "Boswell's Life of Johnson." [172] Of many instances, the following one is the most curious. When Jarvis published his "Don Quixote," Warburton, who was prompt on whatever subject was started, presented him with "A Dissertation on the Origin of the Books of Chivalry." When it appeared, it threw Pope, their common friend, into raptures. He writes, "I knew you as certainly as the ancients did the gods, by the first pace and the very gait." True enough! Warburton's strong genius stamped itself on all his works. But neither the translating painter, nor the simple poet, could imagine the heap of absurdities they were admiring! Whatever Warburton here asserted was false, and whatever he conjectured was erroneous; but his blunders were quite original.--The good sense and knowledge of Tyrwhitt have demolished the whole edifice, without leaving a single brick standing. The absurd rhapsody has been worth preserving, for the sake of the masterly confutation: no uncommon result of Warburton's literary labours! It forms the concluding note in Shakspeare's Love's Labour Lost. [173] Of THEOBALD he was once the companion, and to Sir THOMAS HANMER he offered his notes for his edition. [Hanmer's Shakspeare was given in 1742 to the University of Oxford, for its benefit, and was printed at the University Press, under the management of Dr. Smith and Dr. Shippon. Sir Thomas paid the expenses of the engravings by Gravelot prefixed to each play. The edition was published in 4to. in 1744, it was printed on the "finest royal paper," and does not warrant the severity of Pope, whose editing was equally faulty.] Sir Thomas says he found Warburton's notes "sometimes just, but mostly wild and out of the way." Warburton paid a visit to Sir Thomas for a week, which he conceived was to assist him in perfecting his darling text; but hints were now dropped by Warburton, that he might publish the work corrected, by which a greater sum of money might be got than could be by that plaything of Sir Thomas, which shines in all its splendour in the Dunciad; but this project did not suit Hanmer, whose life seemed greatly to depend on the magnificent Oxford edition, which "was not to go into the hands of booksellers." On this, Warburton, we are told by Hanmer, "flew into a great rage, and there is an end of the story." With what haughtiness he treats these two friends, for once they were such! Had the Dey of Algiers been the editor of Shakspeare, he could not have issued his orders more peremptorily for the decapitation of his rivals. Of Theobald and Hanmer he says, "the one was recommended to me as a poor man, the other as a poor critic: and to each of them at different times I communicated a great number of observations, which they managed, as they saw fit, to the relief of their several distresses. Mr. Theobald was naturally turned to industry and labour. What he read he could transcribe; but as to what he thought, if ever he did think, he could but ill express, so he read on: and by that means got a character of learning, without risking to every observer the imputation of wanting a better talent."--See what it is to enjoy too close an intimacy with a man of wit! "As for the Oxford Editor, he wanted nothing (alluding to Theobald's want of money) but what he might very well be without, the reputation of a critic," &c. &c.--Warburton's Preface to Shakspeare. His conduct to Dr. GREY, the editor of Hudibras, cannot be accounted for by any known fact. I have already noticed their quarrels in the "Calamities of Authors." Warburton cheerfully supplied Grey with various notes on Hudibras, though he said he had thought of an edition himself, and they were gratefully acknowledged in Grey's Preface; but behold! shortly afterwards they are saluted by Warburton as "an execrable heap of nonsense;" further, he insulted Dr. Grey for the number of his publications! Poor Dr. Grey and his "Coadjutors," as Warburton sneeringly called others of his friends, resented this by "A Free and Familiar Letter to that Great Preserver of Pope and Shakspeare, the Rev. Mr. William Warburton." The doctor insisted that Warburton had had sufficient share in those very notes to be considered as one of the "Coadjutors." "I may venture to say, that whoever was the fool of the company before he entered (or the fool of the piece, in his own diction) he was certainly so after he engaged in that work; for, as Ben Jonson observes, 'he that thinks himself the Master-Wit is commonly the Master-Fool.'" [174] Warburton certainly used little intrigues: he trafficked with the obscure Reviews of the times. He was a correspondent in "The Works of the Learned," where the account of his first volume of the Divine Legation, he says, is "a nonsensical piece of stuff;" and when Dr. Doddridge offered to draw up an article for his second, the favour was accepted, and it was sent to the miserable journal, though acknowledged "to be too good for it." In the same journal were published all his specimens of Shakspeare, some years after they had appeared in the "General Dictionary," with a high character of these wonderful discoveries.--"The Alliance," when first published, was announced in "The Present State of the Republic of Letters," to be the work of a gentleman whose capacity, judgment, and learning deserve some eminent dignity in the Church of England, of which he is "now an inferior minister."--One may presume to guess at "the gentleman," a little impatient for promotion, who so much cared whether Warburton was only "now an inferior minister." These are little arts. Another was, that Warburton sometimes acted Falstaff's part, and ran his sword through the dead! In more instances than one this occurred. Sir Thomas Hanmer was dead when Warburton, then a bishop, ventured to assert that Sir Thomas's letter concerning their intercourse about Shakspeare was "one continued falsehood from beginning to end." The honour and veracity of Hanmer must prevail over the "liveliness" of Warburton, for Hurd lauds his "lively preface to his Shakspeare." But the "Biographia Britannica" bears marks of Warburton's violence, in a cancelled sheet. See the Index, art. HANMER; [where we are told "the sheet being castrated at the instance of Mr., now Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, it has been reprinted as an appendix to the work," it consisted in the suppression of one of Hanmer's letters.] He did not choose to attack Dr. Middleton in form, during his lifetime, but reserved his blow when his antagonist was no more. I find in Cole's MSS. this curious passage:--"It was thought, at Cambridge, that Dr. Middleton and Dr. Warburton did not cordially esteem one another; yet both being keen and thorough sportsmen, they were mutually afraid to engage to each other, for fear of a fall. If that was the case, the bishop judged prudently, however fairly it may be looked upon, to stay till it was out of the power of his adversary to make any reply, before he gave his answer." Warburton only replied to Middleton's "Letter from Rome," in his fourth edition of the "Divine Legation," 1765.--When Dyson firmly defended his friend Akenside from the rude attacks of Warburton, it is observed, that he bore them with "prudent patience:" he never replied! [175] These critical extravaganzas are scarcely to be paralleled by "Bentley's Notes on Milton." How Warburton turned "an allegorical mermaid" into "the Queen of Scots;"--showed how Shakspeare, in one word, and with one epithet "the majestic world," described the Orbis Romanus, alluded to the Olympic Games, &c.; yet, after all this discovery, seems rather to allude to a story about Alexander, which Warburton happened to recollect at that moment;--and how he illustrated Octavia's idea of the fatal consequences of a civil war between Cæsar and Antony, who said it would "cleave the world," by the story of Curtius leaping into the chasm;--how he rejected "allowed, with absolute power," as not English, and read "hallowed," on the authority of the Roman Tribuneship being called Sacro-sancta Potestas; how his emendations often rose from puns; as for instance, when, in Romeo and Juliet, it is said of the Friar, that "the city is much obliged to him," our new critic consents to the sound of the word, but not to the spelling, and reads hymn; that is, to laud, to praise! These, and more extraordinary instances of perverting ingenuity and abused erudition, would form an uncommon specimen of criticism, which may be justly ridiculed, but which none, except an exuberant genius, could have produced. The most amusing work possible would be a real Warburton's Shakspeare, which would contain not a single thought, and scarcely an expression, of Shakspeare's! [176] Had Johnson known as much as we do of Warburton's opinion of his critical powers, it would have gone far to have cured his amiable prejudice in favour of Warburton, who really was a critic without taste, and who considered literature as some do politics, merely as a party business. I shall give a remarkable instance. When Johnson published his first critical attempt on Macbeth, he commended the critical talents of Warburton; and Warburton returned the compliment in the preface to his Shakspeare, and distinguishes Johnson as "a man of parts and genius." But, unluckily, Johnson afterwards published his own edition; and, in his editorial capacity, his public duty prevailed over his personal feelings: all this went against Warburton; and the opinions he now formed of Johnson were suddenly those of insolent contempt. In a letter to Hurd, he writes: "Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think alike!" And to another friend: "The remarks he makes, in every page, on my Commentaries, are full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in them as much folly as malignity, I should have reason to be offended with." He consoles himself, however, that Johnson's notes, accompanying his own, will enable even "the trifling part of the public" not to mistake in the comparison.--NICHOLS'S "Literary Anecdotes," vol. v. p. 595. And what became of Johnson's noble Preface to Shakspeare? Not a word on that!--Warburton, who himself had written so many spirited ones, perhaps did not like to read one finer than his own,--so he passed it by! He travelled through Egypt, but held his hands before his eyes at a pyramid! [177] Thomas Edwards chiefly led the life of a literary student, though he studied for the Bar at Lincoln's-Inn, and was fully admitted a member thereof. He died unmarried at the age of 58. He descended from a family of lawyers; possessed a sufficient private property to ensure independence, and died on his own estate of Turrick, in Buckinghamshire. Dr. Warton observes, "This attack on Mr. Edwards is not of weight sufficient to weaken the effects of his excellent 'Canons of Criticism,' all impartial critics allow these remarks to have been decisive and judicious, and his book remains unrefuted and unanswerable."--ED. [178] Some grave dull men, who did not relish the jests, doubtless the booksellers, who, to buy the name of Warburton, had paid down 500l. for the edition, loudly complained that Edwards had injured both him and them, by stopping the sale! On this Edwards expresses his surprise, how "a little twelvepenny pamphlet could stop the progress of eight large octavo volumes;" and apologises, by applying a humorous story to Warburton, for "puffing himself off in the world for what he is not, and now being discovered."--"I am just in the case of a friend of mine, who, going to visit an acquaintance, upon entering his room, met a person going out of it:--'Prythee, Jack,' says he, 'what do you do with that fellow?' 'Why, 'tis Don Pedro di Mondongo, my Spanish master.'--'Spanish master!' replies my friend; 'why, he's an errant Teague; I know the fellow well enough: 'tis Rory Gehagan. He may possibly have been in Spain; but, depend on't, he will sell you the Tipperary brogue for pure Castilian.' Now honest Rory has just the same reason of complaint against this gentleman as Mr. Warburton has against me, and I suppose abused him as heartily for it; but nevertheless the gentleman did both parties justice." Some secret history is attached to this publication, so fatal to Warburton's critical character in English literature. This satire, like too many which have sprung out of literary quarrels, arose from personal motives! When Edwards, in early life, after quitting college, entered the army, he was on a visit at Mr. Allen's, at Bath, whose niece Warburton afterwards married. Literary subjects formed the usual conversation. Warburton, not suspecting the red coat of covering any Greek, showed his accustomed dogmatical superiority. Once, when the controversy was running high, Edwards taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a manner quite contrary to Warburton. He did unluckily something more--he showed that Warburton's mistake had arisen from having used a French translation!--and all this before Ralph Allen and his niece! The doughty critic was at once silenced, in sullen indignation and mortal hatred. To this circumstance is attributed Edwards's "Canons of Criticism," which were followed up by Warburton with incessant attacks; in every new edition of Pope, in the "Essay on Criticism," and the Dunciad. Warburton asserts that Edwards is a very dull writer (witness the pleasantry that carries one through a volume of no small size), that he is a libeller (because he ruined the critical character of Warburton)--and "a libeller (says Warburton, with poignancy), is nothing but a Grub-street critic run to seed."--He compares Edwards's wit and learning to his ancestor Tom Thimble's, in the Rehearsal (because Edwards read Greek authors in their original), and his air of good-nature and politeness, to Caliban's in the Tempest (because he had so keenly written the "Canons of Criticism").--I once saw a great literary curiosity: some proof-sheets of the Dunciad of Warburton's edition. I observed that some of the bitterest notes were after-thoughts, written on those proof-sheets after he had prepared the book for the press--one of these additions was his note on Edwards. Thus Pope's book afforded renewed opportunities for all the personal hostilities of this singular genius! [179] In the "Richardsoniana," p. 264, the younger Richardson, who was admitted to the intimacy of Pope, and collated the press for him, gives some curious information about Warburton's Commentary, both upon the "Essay on Man" and the "Essay on Criticism." "Warburton's discovery of the 'regularity' of Pope's 'Essay on Criticism,' and 'the whole scheme' of his 'Essay on Man,' I happen to know to be mere absurd refinement in creating conformities; and this from Pope himself, though he thought fit to adopt them afterwards." The genius of Warburton might not have found an invincible difficulty in proving that the "Essay on Criticism" was in fact an Essay on Man, and the reverse. Pope, before he knew Warburton, always spoke of his "Essay on Criticism" as "an irregular collection of thoughts thrown together as Horace's 'Art of Poetry' was." "As for the 'Essay on Man,'" says Richardson, "I know that he never dreamed of the scheme he afterwards adopted; but he had taken terror about the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism and deistical tendency, of which my father and I talked with him frequently at Twickenham, without his appearing to understand it, or ever thinking to alter those passages which we suggested."--This extract is to be valued, for the information is authentic; and it assists us in throwing some light on the subtilty of Warburton's critical impositions. [180] The postscript to Warburton's "Dedication to the Freethinkers," is entirely devoted to Akenside; with this bitter opening, "The Poet was too full of the subject and of himself." [181] "An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, occasioned by his Treatment of the Author of 'The Pleasures of the Imagination,'" 1744. While Dyson repels Warburton's accusations against "the Poet," he retorts some against the critic himself. Warburton often perplexed a controversy by a subtile change of a word; or by breaking up a sentence; or by contriving some absurdity in the shape of an inference, to get rid of it in a mock triumph. These little weapons against the laws of war are insidiously practised in the war of words. Warburton never replied. [182] The paradoxical title of his great work was evidently designed to attract the unwary. "The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated--from the omission of a future state!" It was long uncertain whether it was "a covert attack on Christianity, instead of a defence of it." I have here no concern with Warburton's character as a polemical theologist; this has been the business of that polished and elegant scholar, Bishop Lowth, who has shown what it is to be in Hebrew literature "a Quack in Commentatorship, and a Mountebank in Criticism." He has fully entered into all the absurdity of Warburton's "ill-starred Dissertation on Job." It is curious to observe that Warburton in the wild chase of originality, often too boldly took the bull by the horns, for he often adopted the very reasonings and objections of infidels!--for instance, in arguing on the truth of the Hebrew text, because the words had no points when a living language, he absolutely prefers the Koran for correctness! On this Lowth observes: "You have been urging the same argument that Spinoza employed, in order to destroy the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, and to introduce infidelity and atheism." Lowth shows further, that "this was also done by 'a society of gentlemen,' in their 'Sacerdotism Displayed,' said to be written by 'a select committee of the Deists and Freethinkers of Great Britain,' whose author Warburton himself had represented to be 'the forwardest devil of the whole legion.'" Lowth, however, concludes that all the mischief has arisen only from "your lordship's undertaking to treat of a subject with which you appear to be very much unacquainted."--LOWTH'S Letter, p. 91. [183] Lowth remonstrated with Warburton on his "supreme authority:"--"I did not care to protest against the authoritative manner in which you proceeded, or to question your investiture in the high office of Inquisitor General and Supreme Judge of the Opinions of the Learned, which you had long before assumed, and had exercised with a ferocity and a despotism without example in the Republic of Letters, and hardly to be paralleled among the disciples of Dominic; exacting their opinions to the standard of your infallibility, and prosecuting with implacable hatred every one that presumed to differ from you."--LOWTH'S Letter to W., p. 9. [184] Warburton had the most cutting way of designating his adversaries, either by the most vehement abuse or the light petulance that expressed his ineffable contempt. He says to one, "Though your teeth are short, what you want in teeth you have in venom, and know, as all other creatures do, where your strength lies." He thus announces in one of the prefaces to the "Divine Legation" the name of the author of a work on "A Future State of Rewards and Punishments," in which were some objections to Warburton's theory:--"I shall, therefore, but do what indeed would be justly reckoned the cruellest of all things, tell my reader the name of this miserable; which we find to be J. TILLARD." "Mr. Tillard was first condemned (says the author of 'Confusion Worse Confounded,') as a ruffian that stabs a man in the dark, because he did not put his name to his book against the 'Divine Legation;' and afterwards condemned as lost to shame, both as a man and a writer, because he did put his name to it." Would not one imagine this person to be one of the lowest of miscreants? He was a man of fortune and literature. Of this person Warburton says in a letter, "This is a man of fortune, and it is well he is so, for I have spoiled his trade as a writer; and as he was very abusive, free-thinking, and anonymous, I have not spared to expose his ignorance and ill faith." But afterwards, having discovered that he was a particular friend to Dr. Oliver, he makes awkward apologies, and declares he would not have gone so far had he known this! He was often so vehement in his abuse that I find he confessed it himself, for, in preparing a new edition of the "Divine Legation," he tells Dr. Birch that he has made "several omissions of passages which were thought vain, insolent, and ill-natured." It is amusing enough to observe how he designates men as great as himself. When he mentions the learned Hyde, he places him "at the head of a rabble of lying orientalists." When he alludes to Peters, a very learned and ingenious clergyman, he passes by him as "The Cornish Critic." A friend of Peters observed that "he had given Warburton 'a Cornish hug,' of which he might be sore as long as he lived." Dr. Taylor, the learned editor of Demosthenes, he selects from "his fellows," that is, other dunces: a delicacy of expression which offended scholars. He threatens Dr. Stebbing, who had preserved an anonymous character, "to catch this Eel of Controversy, since he hides his head by the tail, the only part that sticks out of the mud, more dirty indeed than slippery, and still more weak than dirty, as passing through a trap where he was forced at every step to leave part of his skin--that is, his system." Warburton has often true wit. With what provoking contempt he calls Sir Thomas Hanmer always "The Oxford Editor!" and in his attack on Akenside, never fails to nickname him, in derision, "The Poet!" I refer the reader to a postscript of his "Dedication to the Freethinkers," for a curious specimen of supercilious causticity in his description of Lord Kaimes as a critic, and Akenside as "The Poet!" Of this pair he tells us, in bitter derision, "they are both men of taste." Hurd imitated his master successfully, by using some qualifying epithet, or giving an adversary some odd nickname, or discreetly dispensing a little mortifying praise. The antagonists he encounters were men sometimes his superiors, and these he calls "sizeable men." Some are styled "insect blasphemers!" The learned Lardner is reduced to "the laborious Dr. Lardner;" and "Hume's History" is treated with the discreet praise of being "the most readable history we have." He carefully hints to Leland that "he had never read his works, nor looked into his translations; but what he has heard of his writings makes him think favourably of him." Thus he teases the rhetorical professor by mentioning the "elegant translation which, they say, you have made of Demosthenes!" And he understands that he is "a scholar, who, they say, employs himself in works of learning and taste." Lowth seems to have discovered this secret art of Warburton; for he says, "You have a set of names always at hand, a kind of infamous list, or black calendar, where every offender is sure to find a niche ready to receive him; nothing so easy as the application, and slight provocation is sufficient." [185] Sometimes Warburton left his battles to be fought by subaltern genius; a circumstance to which Lowth, with keen pleasantry, thus alludes:--"Indeed, my lord, I was afterwards much surprised, when, having been with great civility dismissed from your presence, I found your footman at your door, armed with his master's cane, and falling upon me without mercy, yourself looking on and approving, and having probably put the weapon with proper orders into his hands. You think, it seems, that I ought to have taken my beating quietly and patiently, in respect to the livery which he wore. I was not of so tame a disposition: I wrested the weapon from him, and broke it. Your lordship, it seems, by an oblique blow, got an unlucky rap on the knuckles; though you may thank yourself for it, you lay the blame on me."--LOWTH'S Letter to W., p. 11. Warburton and Hurd frequently concerted together on the manner of attack and defence. In one of these letters of Hurd's it is very amusing to read--"Taylor is a more creditable dunce than Webster. What do you think to do with the Appendix against Tillard and Sykes? Why might not Taylor rank with them," &c. The Warburtonians had also a system of espionage. When Dr. Taylor was accused by one of them of having said that Warburton was no scholar, the learned Grecian replied that he did not recollect ever saying that Dr. Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always thought so. Hence a tremendous quarrel! Hurd, the Mercury of our Jupiter, cast the first light shaft against the doctor, then Chancellor of Lincoln, by alluding to the Preface of his work on Civil Law as "a certain thing prefatory to a learned work, intituled 'The Elements of Civil Law:'" but at length Jove himself rolled his thunder on the hapless chancellor. The doctor had said in his work, that "the Roman emperors persecuted the first Christians, not so much from a dislike of their tenets as from a jealousy of their nocturnal assemblies." Warburton's doctrine was, that "they held nocturnal assemblies because of the persecution of their enemies." One was the fact, and the other the consequence. But the Chancellor of Lincoln was to be outrageously degraded among the dunces! that was the real motive; the "nocturnal assemblies" only the ostensible one. A pamphleteer, in defence of the chancellor, in reply, thought that in "this literary persecution" it might be dangerous "if Dr. Taylor should be provoked to prove in print what he only dropped in conversation." How innocent was this gentleman of the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars! The proof would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his sarcastic pleasantry; and this object was secured by Warburton's forty pages of preface, in which the chancellor stands to be buffeted like an ancient quintain, "a mere lifeless block." All this came upon him for only thinking that Warburton was no scholar! [186] See what I have said at the close of the note, pp. 262-3. In a collection entitled "Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton's late Edition of Mr. Pope's Works," 1751, are numerous epigrams, parodies, and similes on it. I give one:--
Warburton carried the licentiousness of the pen in all these notes to the Dunciad to a height which can only be paralleled in the gross logomachies of Schioppius, Gronovius, and Scaliger, and the rest of that snarling crew. But his wit exceeded even his grossness. He was accused of not sparing--
I have ascertained that Mallet was the author of this furious epistle. He would not acknowledge what he dared not deny. Warburton treated Mallet, in this instance, as he often did his superiors--he never replied! The silence seems to have stung this irascible and evil spirit: he returned again to the charge, with another poisoned weapon. His rage produced "A Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living," 1749. The style of this second letter has been characterised as "bad enough to disgrace even gaols and garrets." Its virulence could not well exceed its predecessor. The oddness of its title has made this worthless thing often inquired after. It is merely personal. It is curious to observe Mallet, in this pamphlet, treat Pope as an object of pity, and call him "this poor man." [David Mallet was the son of an innkeeper, who, by means of the party he wrote for, obtained lucrative appointments under Government, and died rich. He was unscrupulous in his career, and ready as a writer to do the most unworthy things. The death of Admiral Byng was hastened by the unscrupulous denunciations of Mallet, who was pensioned in consequence.] Orator Henley took some pains, on the first appearance of this catching title, to assure his friends that it did not refer to him. The title proved contagious; which shows the abuse of Warburton was very agreeable. Dr. Z. Grey, under the title of "A Country Curate," published "A Free and Familiar Letter to the Great Refiner of Pope and Shakspeare," 1750; and in 1753, young Cibber tried also at "A Familiar Epistle to Mr. William Warburton, from Mr. Theophilus Cibber," prefixed to the "Life of Barton Booth." Dr. Z. Grey's "freedom and familiarity" are designed to show Warburton that he has no wit; but unluckily, the doctor having none himself, his arguments against Warburton's are not decisive. "The familiarity" of Mallet is that of a scoundrel, and the younger Cibber's that of an idiot: the genius of Warburton was secure. Mallet overcharged his gun with the fellest intentions, but found his piece, in bursting, annihilated himself. The popgun of the little Theophilus could never have been heard! [Warburton never lost a chance of giving a strong opinion against Mallet; and Dr. Johnson says, "When Mallet undertook to write the 'Life of Marlborough,' Warburton remarked that he might perhaps forget that Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a philosopher."] But Warburton's rage was only a part of his secret principle; for can anything be more witty than his attack on poor COOPER, the author of "The Life of Socrates?" Having called his book "a late worthless and now forgotten thing, called 'The Life of Socrates,'" he adds, "where the head of the author has just made a shift to do the office of a camera obscura, and represent things in an inverted order, himself above, and Rollin, Voltaire, and every other author of reputation, below." When Cooper complained of this, and of some severer language, to Warburton, through a friend, Warburton replied that Cooper had attacked him, and that he had only taken his revenge "with a slight joke." Cooper was weak and vain enough to print a pamphlet, to prove that this was a serious accusation, and no joke; and if it was a joke, he shows it was not a correct one. In fact, Cooper could never comprehend how his head was like a camera obscura! Cooper was of the Shaftesburian school--philosophers who pride themselves on "the harmony" of their passions, but are too often in discords at a slight disturbance. He equalled the virulence of Warburton, but could not attain to the wit. "I found," says Cooper, "previous to his pretended witticism about the camera obscura, such miserable spawn of wretched malice, as nothing but the inflamed brain of a rank monk could conceive, or the oyster-selling maids near London Bridge could utter." One would not suppose all this came from the school of Plato, but rather from the tub of Diogenes. Something must be allowed for poor Cooper, whose "Life of Socrates" had been so positively asserted to be "a late worthless and forgotten thing." It is curious enough to observe Cooper declaring, after this sally, that Warburton "has very unfortunately used the word impudent (which epithet Warburton had applied to him), as it naturally reminds every reader that the pamphlet published about two years ago, addressed 'to the most impudent man living,' was universally acknowledged to be dedicated to our commentator." Warburton had always the Dunciad in his head when a new quarrel was rising, which produced an odd blunder on the side of Edwards, and provoked that wit to be as dull as Cooper. Warburton said, in one of his notes on Edwards, who had entitled himself "a gentleman of Lincoln's Inn,"--"This gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, is in reality a gentleman only of the Dunciad, or, to speak him better, in the plain language of our honest ancestors to such mushrooms, a gentleman of the last edition." Edwards misunderstood the allusion, and sore at the personal attack which followed, of his having "eluded the solicitude of his careful father," considered himself "degraded of his gentility," that it was "a reflection on his birth," and threatened to apply to "Mr. Warburton's Masters of the Bench, for degrading a 'barrister of their house.'" This afforded a new triumph to Warburton, in a new note, where he explains his meaning of these "mushrooms," whom he meant merely as literary ones; and assures "Fungoso and his friends, who are all gentlemen, that he meant no more than that Edwards had become a gentleman of the last edition of the Dunciad!" Edwards and his fungous friends had understood the phrase as applied to new-fangled gentry. One of these wits, in the collection of verses cited above, says to Warburton:--
[187] Dr. Thomas Balguy was the son of a learned father, at whose rectory of Northallerton he was born; he was appointed Archdeacon of Salisbury in 1759, and afterwards Archdeacon of Winchester. He died at the prebendal house of the latter city in 1795, at the age of 74. His writings are few--chiefly on church government and authority, which brought him into antagonism with Dr. Priestley and others, who objected to the high view he took of its position. With Hurd and Warburton he was always intimate; his sermon on the consecration of the former was one of the sources of adverse attack; the latter notes his death as that of "an old and esteemed friend."--ED. [188] Dr. Brown was patronised and "pitied" by Warburton for years. He used him, but spoke of him disparagingly, as "a helpless creature in the ways of the world." Nichols speaks of him as an "elegant, ingenious, and unhappy author." His father was a native of Scotland; his son was born at Rothbury, in Northumberland, educated at Cambridge, made minor canon at Carlisle, but resigned it in disgust, living in obscurity in that city several years, till the Rebellion of 1745, when he acted as a volunteer at the siege of the Castle, and behaved with great intrepidity. His publication of an "Essay on Satire," on the death of Pope, led to his acquaintance with Warburton, who helped him to the rectory of Horksley, near Colchester; but he quarrelled with his patron, as he afterwards quarrelled with others. He then settled down to the vicarage of St. Nicholas, Newcastle, but not for long, as an educational scheme of the Empress of Russia offered him inducements to leave England; but his health failed him before he could carry out his intentions, irritability succeeded, and his disappointments, real and imaginary, led him to commit suicide in the fifty-first year of his age. He seems to have been a continual trouble to Warburton, who often alludes to his unsettled habits--and schooled him occasionally after his own fashion. Thus he writes in 1777:--"Brown is here; I think rather faster than ordinary, but no wiser. You cannot imagine the tenderness they all have of his tender places, and with how unfeeling a hand I probe them."--ED. [189] Towne is so far "unknown to fame" that his career is unrecorded by our biographers; he was content to work for, and under the guidance of Warburton, as a literary drudge.--ED. [190] Warburton, indeed, was always looking about for fresh recruits: a circumstance which appears in the curious Memoirs of the late Dr. Heathcote, written by himself. Heathcote, when young, published anonymously a pamphlet in the Middletonian controversy. By the desire of Warburton, the bookseller transmitted his compliments to the anonymous author. "I was greatly surprised," says Heathcote, "but soon after perceived that Warburton's state of authorship being a state of war, it was his custom to be particularly attentive to all young authors, in hopes of enlisting them into his service. Warburton was more than civil, when necessary, on these occasions, and would procure such adventurers some slight patronage."--NICHOLS'S "Literary Anecdotes," vol. v. p. 536. [191] We are astonished at the boldness of the minor critic, when, even after the fatal edition of Warburton's Shakspeare, he should still venture, in the life of his great friend, to assert that "this fine edition must ever be highly valued by men of sense and taste; a spirit congenial to that of the author breathing throughout!" Is it possible that the man who wrote this should ever have read the "Canons of Criticism?" Yet is it to be supposed that he who took so lively an interest in the literary fortunes of his friend should not have read them? The Warburtonians appear to have adopted one of the principles of the Jesuits in their controversies, which was to repeat arguments which had been confuted over and over again; to insinuate that they had not been so! But this was not too much to risk by him who, in his dedication of "Horace's Epistle to Augustus," with a Commentary, had hardily and solemnly declared that "Warburton, in his enlarged view of things, had not only revived the two models of Aristotle and Longinus, but had rather struck out a new original plan of criticism, which should unite the virtues of each of them. This experiment was made on the two greatest of our own poets--Shakspeare and Pope. Still (he adds, addressing Warburton) you went farther, by joining to those powers a perfect insight into human nature; and so ennobling the exercise of literary by the justest moral censure, you have now, at length, advanced criticism to its full glory." A perpetual intercourse of mutual adulation animated the sovereign and his viceroy, and, by mutual support, each obtained the same reward: two mitres crowned the greater and the minor critic. This intercourse was humorously detected by the lively author of "Confusion Worse Confounded."--"When the late Duke of R.," says he, "kept wild beasts, it was a common diversion to make two of his bears drunk (not metaphorically with flattery, but literally with strong ale), and then daub them over with honey. It was excellent sport to see how lovingly (like a couple of critics) they would lick and claw one another." It is almost amazing to observe how Hurd, who naturally was of the most frigid temperament, and the most subdued feelings, warmed, heated, and blazed in the progressive stages "of that pageantry of praise spread over the Rev. Mr. Warburton, when the latter was advancing fast towards a bishoprick," to use the words of Dr. Parr, a sagacious observer of man. However, notwithstanding the despotic mandates of our Pichrocole and his dapper minister, there were who did not fear to meet the greater bear of the two so facetiously described above. And the author of "Confusion Worse Confounded" tells a familiar story, which will enliven the history of our great critic. "One of the bears mentioned above happened to get loose, and was running along the street in which a tinker was gravely walking. The people all cried, 'Tinker! tinker! beware of the bear!' Upon this Magnano faced about with great composure; and raising his staff, knocked down Bruin, then setting his arms a-kimbo, walked off very sedately; only saying, 'Let the bear beware of the tinker,' which is now become a proverb in those parts."--"Confusion Worse Confounded," p. 75. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |