Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 30

"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 aeneid 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 att.i.tude 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--

"Methinks I see her like the mighty Eagle renewing her immortal youth, and purging her opening sight at the un.o.bstructed beams of our benign meridian Sun," &c.

Such a glowing metaphor, in the uncouth prose of Warburton, startled Lowth's cla.s.sical ear. It was indeed "the Musa Pedestris who had got on horseback in a high prancing style;"

for as it has since been pointed out, it is a well-known pa.s.sage towards the close of the Areopagitica of Milton, whose prose is so often purely poetical. See Birch's Edition of Milton's Prose Works, I. 158. Warburton was familiarly conversant with our great vernacular writers at a time when their names generally were better known than their works, and when it was considered safe to pillage their most glorious pa.s.sages. Warburton has been convicted of s.n.a.t.c.hing their purple patches, and sewing them into his coa.r.s.er web, without any acknowledgment; he did this in the present remarkable instance, and at a later day, in the preface to his "Julian,"

he laid violent hands on one of Raleigh's splendid metaphors.

[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 pa.s.sed by unnoticed Warburton's humility, even to weakness, combined with pride which could rise to haughtiness.

"He was so proud, that should he meet The twelve apostles in the street, He'd turn his nose up at them all, And shove his Saviour from the wall."

Yet this man

----"Fawned through all his life For patrons first, then for a wife; Wrote _Dedications_, which must make The heart of every Christian quake."

_The Duellist._

It is certain that the proud and supercilious Warburton long crouched and fawned. MALLET, at least, well knew all that pa.s.sed between Warburton and Pope. In the "Familiar Epistle"

he a.s.serts that Warburton was introduced to Pope by his "nauseous flattery." A remarkable instance, besides the dedications we have noticed, occurred in his correspondence with Sir Thomas Hanmer. He did not venture to attack "The Oxford Editor," as he sarcastically distinguishes him, without first demanding back his letters, which were immediately returned, from Sir Thomas's high sense of honour. Warburton might otherwise have been shown strangely to contradict himself, for in these letters he had been most lavish of his flatteries and encomiums on the man whom he covered with ridicule in the preface to his Shakspeare. See "An Answer to certain Pa.s.sages in Mr. W.'s Preface to Shakspeare," 1748.

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 princ.i.p.al 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

"He could cringe and creep, be civil, And hold a stirrup to the devil, If, _in a journey to his mind_, He'd let him mount, and ride behind."

The author of the "Canons of Criticism," with all his sprightly sarcasm, gives a history of Warburton's later Dedications. "The first edition of 'The Alliance' came out without a dedication, but was presented to the bishops; and when nothing came of that, the second was addressed to both the Universities; and when nothing came of that, the third was dedicated to a n.o.ble Earl, and nothing has yet come of that."

Appendix to "Canons of Criticism," seventh edit. 261.

[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, ent.i.tled "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 Caesar_: this literary curiosity had otherwise been lost for posterity; its whole history is a series of wonderful escapes.

By this doc.u.ment 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!"]

[155] Lee introduces Alexander the Great, saying,

"When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood Perch'd on my beaver in the Granic flood, When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore, And the pale Fates stood frighted on the sh.o.r.e; When the Immortals on the billows rode, And I myself appear'd the leading G.o.d!"

In the province of taste Warburton was always at sea without chart or compa.s.s, and was as unlucky in his panegyric on Milton as on Lee. He calls the "Paradise Regained" "a charming poem, _nothing inferior_ in the _poetry_ and the _sentiments_ to the Paradise Lost." Such extravagance could only have proceeded from a critic too little sensible to the essential requisites of poetry itself.

[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:--

"A curate first, he read and read, And laid in, while he should have fed The souls of his neglected flock, Of rending, such a mighty stock, That he o'ercharged the weary brain With more than she could well contain; More than she was with spirit fraught To turn and methodise to thought; And which, _like ill-digested food, To humours turn'd, and not to blood_."

The opinion of BENTLEY, when he saw "The Divine Legation," was a sensible one. "This man," said he, "has a monstrous appet.i.te, with a very bad digestion."

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 Encyclopaedia, 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 a.s.serts 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 ama.s.sed 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--

"That last infirmity of n.o.ble minds."

In such an exalted state was Warburton's mind when he was writing this, his own character.

[158] The author of "The Canons of Criticism" addressed a severe sonnet to Warburton; and alludes to the "Alliance":--

"Reign he sole king in paradoxal land, And for Utopia plan his idle schemes Of _visionary leagues, alliance vain 'Twixt_ Will _and_ Warburton--"

On which he adds this note, humorously stating the grand position of the work:--"The whole argument by which the _alliance between Church and State_ is established, Mr.

Warburton founds upon this supposition--'That people, considering themselves in a religious capacity, may contract with themselves, considered in a civil capacity.' The conceit is ingenious, but is not his own. _Scrub_, in the _Beaux Stratagem_, had found it out long ago: he considers himself as acting the different parts of all the servants in the family; and so _Scrub_, the coachman, ploughman, or justice's clerk, might contract with _Scrub_, the butler, for such a quant.i.ty of ale as the other a.s.sumed character demanded."--Appendix, p.

261.

[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 t.i.thes, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.dhead 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 ma.s.ses of fanciful erudition.

[162] Warburton lost himself in the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed. This work hara.s.sed 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 "encyclopaedia" 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 a.s.sure 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d's people believed in the immortality of the soul--which can we doubt they did? and which Mena.s.seh Ben Israel has written his treatise, "De Resurrectione Mortuorum,"