the Preface, he proceeds to appropriate his labours. He adopts Theobald's text as the basis of his own; he steals his illustrations; he incorporates, generally without a word of acknowledgment, most of Theobald's best emendations, carefully assigning to him such as are of little importance, while in his notes he keeps up a running fire of sneers and sarcasms.COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1895, The Porson of Shakspearian Criticism, Essays and Studies, pp. 269, 270.

Though a few of Warburton's emendations have been accepted, they are generally marked by both audacious and gratuitous quibbling, and show his real incapacity for the task. Though this was less obvious at the time, a telling exposure was made by Thomas Edwards in "a Supplement" to Warburton's edition, called in later editions "Canons of Criticism." Johnson compared Edwards to a fly stinging a stately horse; but the sting was sharp, and the "Canons of Criticism" is perhaps the best result of Warburton's enterprise. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1899, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LIX, p. 306.

EDITIONS OF POPE

You have signalised yourself by affecting to be the bully of Mr. Pope's memory, into whose acquaintance, at the latter end of the poor man's life, you were introduced by your nauseous flattery; and whose admirable writings you are about to publish, with commentaries worthy of Scriblerus himself; for we may judge of them beforehand by the specimens we have already seen of your skill in criticism.-MALLET, DAVID? 1749, Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living.

Soon after Pope's acquaintance with Warburton commenced, and the latter had published some of his heavy commentaries on that poet, his friend Lord Marchmont told him that he was convinced he was one of the vainest men living. "How so?" says Pope. "Because, you little rogue, replied Lord Marchmont, "it is manifest from your close connection with your new commentator you want to show posterity what an exquisite poet you are, and what a quantity of dulness you can carry down on your back without sinking under the load."-MALONE, EDMOND, 1789, Maloniana, ed. Prior, p. 385.

Dr. Warburton, endeavouring to demonstrate, what Addison could not discover,

nor what Pope himself, according to the testimony of his intimate friend, Richardson, ever thought of or intended, that this Essay was written with a methodical and systematical regularity, has accompanied the whole with a long and laboured commentary, in which he has tortured many passages to support this groundless opinion. Warburton had certainly wit, genius, and much miscellaneous learning; but was perpetually dazzled and misled, by the eager desire of seeing everything in a new light unobserved before, into perverse interpretations and forced comments. It is painful to see such abilities wasted on such unsubstantial objects. Accordingly his notes on Shakspeare have been totally demolished by Edwards and Malone; and Gibbon has torn up by the roots his fanciful and visionary interpretation of the sixth book of Virgil. And but few readers, I believe, will be found that will cordially subscribe to an opinion lately delivered, that his notes on Pope's Works are the very best ever given on any classic whatever. For, to instance no other, surely the attempt to reconcile the doctrines of the "Essay on Man" to the doctrines of revelation, is the rashest adventure in which ever critic yet engaged. This is, in truth, to divine, rather than to explain an author's meaning. -WARTON, JOSEPH, 1797, ed. Pope.

Warburton had more to do with Pope's satires as an original suggester, and not merely as a commentator, than with any other section of his works. Pope and he hunted in couples over this field: and those who know the absolute craziness of Warburton's mind, the perfect frenzy and lymphaticus error which possessed him for leaving all high-roads of truth and simplicity, in order to trespass over hedge and ditch after coveys of shy paradoxes, cannot be surprised that Pope's good sense should often have quitted him under such guidance. The Doc

tor was latterly always the instigator to any outrage on good sense, and Pope, from mere habit of deference to the Doctor's theology and theological wig, as well as from gratitude for the Doctor's pugnacity in his defence (since Warburton really was as good as a bull-dog in protecting Pope's advance or retreat), followed with docility the leading of his reverned friend into any excess of folly.-DE

QUINCEY, THOMAS, 1848-58, The Poetry of Pope, Works, ed. Masson, vol. XI, pp. 69, 71.

Warburton, Pope's first editor, had a vigorous understanding, and possessed the enormous advantage that he carried on the work in concert with the poet, and could ask the explanation of every difficulty. A diseased ambition rendered his talents and opportunities useless. Without originality he aspired to be original, and imagined that to fabricate hollow paradoxes, and torture language into undesigned meanings was the surest evidence of a fertile, penetrating genius. He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive. power. He has left no worse specimen of his perverse propensity than the spurious fancies, and idle refinements he fathered upon Pope. They are among his baldest paradoxes, are conveyed in his heaviest style, and are supported by his feeblest sophistry. His lifeless and verbose conceits soon provoke by their falsity, and fatigue by their ponderousness.-ELWIN, WHITWELL, 1871, ed., The Works of Alexander Pope, Introduction, vol. I, p. xx.

It will thus be seen that Warburton not only slurred over the explanation of difficult passages in Pope's text, but that to promote his interest, or to gratify his spite, he did not scruple to misrepresent the plain intention of his author, and to introduce into his notes irrelevant sarcasms of his own. Such a perversion of his trust of course raises the further presumption that he may have tampered with the text itself, which we know differs in several important respects from all the editions published in Pope's lifetime.

Quite enough evidence, however, remains of the untrustworthiness of Warburton's work to make us deplore the fact that his editions should have been taken as the starting-point for all succeeding investigations.- COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1881, ed., The Works of Alexander Pope, Introductory Notice to Moral Essays and Satires, vol. III, pp. 12, 13.

GENERAL

Mr. Warburton is the greatest general critic I ever knew, the most capable of

seeing through all the possibilities of things.-POPE, ALEXANDER, 1730? Spence's Anecdotes, Supplement, p. 256.

The

He joined, to a more than athletic strength of body, a prodigious memory; and to both a prodigious industry. He had read almost constantly twelve or fourteen hours a day, for five-and-twenty or thirty years; and had heaped together as much learning as could be crowded into a head. In the course of my acquaintance with him, I consulted with him once or twice, -not oftener, for I found this mass of learning of as little use to me as to the owner. man was communicative enough, but nothing was distinct in his mind. How could t be otherwise? he had never spared time to think,-all was employed in reading. His reason had not the merit of common mechanism. When you press a watch or pull a clock, they answer your question with precision. . . . But when you ask this man a question, he overwhelmed you by pouring forth all that the several terms or words of your question recalled to his memory; and if he omitted anything, it was that very thing to which the sense of the whole question should have led him and confined him. To ask him a question was to wind up a spring in his memory, that rattled on with vast rapidity and confused noise, till the force of it was spent; and you went away with all the noise in your ears, stunned and uninformed, I never left him that I was not ready to say to him, "Dieu vous fassel a grace de devenir moins savant!"-BOLINGBROKE, HENRY SAINT-JOHN LORD, 1735? Letters on the Study and Use of History, Letter iv.

It is my misfortune, 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.-EDWARDS, THOMAS, 1747, Canons of Criticism, Preface.

He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervid and vehement, supplied by incessant and unlimited inquiry with wonderful extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor clouded his perspicacity. To every work he brought a memory fullfraught, together with a fancy fertile of original combinations, and at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and the wit. But his knowledge was too

multifarious to be always exact, and his pursuits too eager to be always cautious. His abilities gave him a haughty confidence, which he disclaimed to conceal or modify; and his impatience of opposition disposed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous superiority as made his readers commonly his enemies, and excited against the advocate the wishes of some who favoured the cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman emperor's determination, orderint dum metuant; he used no allurements of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade. His style is copious without selection, and forcible without neatness; he took the words that presented themselves; his diction is coarse and impure, and his sentences are unmeasured. unmeasured. JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779-81, Pope, Lives of the English Poets.

And whom we may compare, not altogether improperly, to a blazing star that has appeared in our hemisphere, obscure his origin, resplendent his light, irregular his motion, and his period quite uncertain. With such a train of quotations as he carries in his tail, and the eccentricity of the vast circuit he takes, the vulgar are alarmed, the learned puzzled. Something wonderful it certainly protends, and I wish he may go off without leaving some malignant influence at least among us, if he does not set us on fire. CUMING, WILLIAM, c1785, Letter, Illustrations of the Literatures of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Nichols, vol. II, p. 840.

While they (Leland and Jortin) were living, no balm was poured into their wounded spirits by the hand that pierced them; and if their characters after death remain unimpaired by the rude shocks of controversy and the secret crimes of slander, their triumph is to be ascribed to their own strength, and to the conscious weakness of their antagonists, rather than to his love of justice, or his love of peace.-PARR, SAMUEL, 1789, ed., Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian.

The learning and abilities of the author (of the Divine Legation) had raised him to a just eminence; but he reigned the Dictator and tyrant of the World of Literature. The real merit of Warburton was degraded by the pride and presumption with which he pronounced his infallible decrees; in his polemic writings he lashed

his antagonists without mercy or moderation; and his servile flatterers (see the base and malignant Essay on the Delicacy of Friendship), exalting the master critic far above Aristotle and Longinus, assaulted every modest dissenter who refused to consult the oracle and to adore the Idol. In a land of liberty, such despotism must provoke a general opposition, and the zeal of opposition is seldom candid or impartial. GIBBON, EDWARD, 1793, Autobiography.

Warburton had that eagle-eyed sagacity, which pierces through all difficulties and obscurities; and that glow of imagination which gilds and irradiates every object it touches. - HURD, RICHARD, 1808? Commonplace Book, ed. Kilvert, p. 249.

Warburton, we think, was the last of our great divines-the last, perhaps, of any profession who united profound learning with great powers of understanding, and, along with vast and varied stores of acquired knowledge, possessed energy of mind enough to wield them with ease and activity. The days of the Cudworths and Barrows-the Hookers and Taylors, are gone by. He was not only the last of our reasoning scholars, but the last also, we think, of our powerful polemics. This breed, too, we take it, is extinct; and we are not sorry for it.

The truth is, that this extraordinary person was a Giant in literaturewith many of the vices of the Gigantic character. JEFFREY, FRANCIS LORD, 1809, Warburton's Letters, Edinburgh Review, vol. 13, pp. 343, 344, 345.

Nor is there, in the whole compass of our literary history, a character more instructive for its greatness and its failures; none more adapted to excite our curiosity, and which can more completely gratify it. 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.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1814, Warburton, Quarrels of Authors.

It is not a little painful to observe on the disingenuousness of petty critics, who would deny to such a man as Warburton the claim of literary abilities. I will maintain, however, that those abilities were really first-rate, whether he be considered as a religionist and a philosopher (characters which, unhappily, are not always found together) a polemic, or a writer of notes.-BECKET, ANDREW, 1815, Shakspeare's Himself Again, Preface, p. xix.

Warburton's love of paradox is well known. His levity, dogmatism, and surliness have often been exposed. His love of notoriety and of the marvellous was certainly stronger than his attachment to truth. While his talents will always be admired, his character will never be respected. ORME, WILLIAM, 1824, Bibliotheca Biblica.

The currents of life had drifted Warburton on divinity as his profession, but nature designed him for a satirist; and the propensity was too strong to yield even to the study of the Gospels.-STEPHEN, SIR J., 1838, Oxford Catholicism, Edinburgh Review, vol. 67, p. 507.

That it is possible to have all the powers of Warburton, and be greatly in the dark on the truths of the gospel, is made sufficiently evident by his "Treatise on the Doctrine of Grace."-BICKERSTETH, EDWARD, 1844, The Christian Student.

A divine of almost unrivalled erudition (Jortin excepted) in his day.-MILMAN, HENRY HART, 1854? History of Latin Christianity, vol. VIII, bk. xiv, ch. viii, note.

In his literary character, he was of a bold and determined English spirit, ready to resist all opponents, and willing to consider the state of authorship as a state of war. If any deduction be made from this part of his character, it must be on account of his conduct towards Pope, in his advances to whom there appears no great magnanimity, and whom he has always been suspected of defending rather from hope of possible advantage than from sincerity of settled opinion.

Whatever faults he had, he was no bigot.
With bigots he professed to be at perpet-
ual war.
His mind, certainly, was not

of the class in which bigotry fixes itself. -WATSON, JOHN SELBY, 1863, Life of William Warburton, pp. 618, 631.

We have already related some of Warburton's more signal enmities. They are samples only of a whole career. Nay, the man himself is in this but the representative man of his age. Theological literature was a babel of loud vociferation, coarse contradiction, and mean imputation. The prize in this mêlée was to the noisiest lungs and the foulest tongue. The Warburtonians must not bear the blame alone; nor was the disease of distraction confined to divines. The progress of refinement cannot tame the passions, but has curbed the directness with which they then vented themselves in words. Even now malignant imputation, banished from higher literature, still lingers in clerical controversy. But, after every deduction made, we still find there rests upon the Warburtonian school an extraordinary opprobrium on the score of dirt-throwing. Warburton's superiorty and his generous temper ought to have exempted him from

this weakness of inferior writers. Instead of that he is the worst offender.

The vigour of his thought does not concentrate itself in telling paragraphs. It is a rude-we had almost said brute-force penetrating the whole. And his English style is so slipslop, that it would be difficult to find in all the thirteen volumes of his works half a dozen passages which might be taken as fair specimens of his peculiar powers.-PATTISON, MARK, 1863-89, Life of Bishop Warburton, Essays, ed. Nettleship, vol. II, pp. 160, 175.

Bishop Warburton wrote "Remarks on Hume's 'Natural History of Religion.' They are not of much value; in fact, this is one of Warburton's poorest performances. His words were many and strong, his arguments few and feeble. Warburton defended Christianity by throwing mud at its opponents.-HUNT, JOHN, 1869, David Hume, Contemporary Review, vol. 11, p. 95.

Warburton was a fortunate author. Though he published a host of paradoxical notions, his opponents, if we are to trust his repeated assertions, were always fools and knaves.-ELWIN, WHITWELL, 1871, ed., The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. I, p. xiv, note.