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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.’”
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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:—
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“As on the margin of Thames’ silver flood |
Lowth has noticed the use Warburton made of his patent for vending Pope. “I thought you might possibly whip me at the cart’s-tail in a note to the ‘Divine Legation,’ the ordinary place of your literary executions; or pillory me in the Dunciad, another engine which, as legal proprietor, you have very ingeniously and judiciously applied to the same purpose; or, perhaps, have ordered me a kind of Bridewell correction, by one of your beadles, in a pamphlet.”—Lowth’s “Letter to Warburton,” p. 4.
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—
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“Round-house wit and Wapping choler.” |
And one of his most furious assailants thus salutes him:—“Whether you are a wrangling Wapping attorney, a pedantic pretender to criticism, an impudent paradoxical priest, or an animal yet stranger, an heterogeneous medley of all three, as your farraginous style seems to confess.”—An Epistle to the Author of a Libel entitled “A Letter to the Editor of Bolingbroke’s Works,” &c.—See Nichols, vol. v. p. 651.
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:—
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“This mushroom has made sauce for you. |
Warburton had the full command over the Dunciad, even when Pope was alive, for it was in consequence of Warburton’s being refused a degree at Oxford, that the poet, though one had been offered to himself, produced the celebrated lines of “Apollo’s Mayor and Aldermen,” in the fourth Dunciad. Thus it is that the personal likes and dislikes of witty men come down to posterity, and are often mistaken as just satire, when, after all, they are nothing but Literary Quarrels, seldom founded on truth, and very often complete falsehoods!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.