THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

JULY, 1865.

No. CCXLIX.

ART. I. The Life of William Warburton, D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester from 1760 to 1779; with Remarks on his Works. By the Rev. JOHN SELBY WATSON, M.A., M.R.S.L. 8vo. London: 1863.

T

HE name of William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, stands high on the list of the curiosities of reputation. Many writers, famous in their day, are now forgotten, because the objects of their studies and their works lie stranded on some shoal of time, long left dry by the shifting currents of men's interests and speculations. Many others retain a barren name only because they had the good fortune to meet with opponents whose names posterity has not let die. We re

6

member Cartwright and Travers because they engaged in controversy with Hooker; Salmasius, because he was scourged by Milton; and John Dennis, because he was pilloried by Pope. The Dunciad' and the Rosciad' alike have conferred this sort of immortality. Yet we have no reason to think that the names which survive because they have been branded were therefore the names of either blockheads or knaves. Cartwright we know to have been a learned divine; Salmasius, to have been a deeply-read scholar; Dennis, as his remarks on Addison's 'Cato' show, a shrewd and sensible critic, after the critical fashions of his day. But Warburton's reputation does not properly come under any one of these heads. He was not a profound theologian nor an accurate scholar, nor a sensible, though he was at times a shrewd critic. As a divine he is no more to be compared to Lowth than as a scholar or critic he is to be compared to Bentley. In matters of taste none but Warburtonians admitted his canons at the moment, and of Warburtonians we suspect few if any survive at the

VOL. CXXII. NO. CCXLIX.

24

B

it

present hour. Even in his lifetime, his name was better known than his writings. A name, however, he has left, and may be worth while to inquire why that has survived, while the quartos and octavos which earned it are seldom taken down from the shelves. Where there is smoke there must be fire; where place and precedency have been attained even for a few brief years, there must have been a cause for them. What, then, was the cause for William Warburton's having once attracted the attention of his own countrymen, and in a degree also that of the learned throughout Europe?

6

A Life of Warburton has long been a desideratum in English biography, partly because he was so generally abused, and partly because he has been so extravagantly and at the same time so feebly praised by Whitaker of Manchester and Bishop Hurd. Hitherto by far the best account of him is that by the late Mr. D'Israeli in his Quarrels of Authors.' That, however, though instructive and entertaining, is little more than a sketch of great Gloucester,' and it is sometimes paulo iniquior to his real merits. Mr. Watson has performed his task with diligence and impartiality. He admires his subject enough to decline no labour in illustrating it; but he is too sensible of the imperfections of his subject to be its apologist. His analysis of Warburton's various works is the more useful, because the works themselves are not likely to be again consulted by either foes or friends. The theme, too, is better suited to Mr. Watson's powers than the Life of Porson was; for the great Greek scholar demanded more animation than his biographer possesses: whereas the great Ishmaelite of the eighteenth century, whose hand was against all men, and who was himself the butt of nearly every archer of the time, demands only diligence and discrimination, and of these qualities Mr. Watson has a due proportion.

William Warburton was neither merely a scholar nor merely a divine; but like a far greater man in all respects, like Richard Bentley, he embarked fearlessly on the sea of controversy, and though his course was devious, he planted his flagstaff on more than one shore which had been missed by former navigators. In his Divine Legation,' as in his Julian,' he threw out suggestions that wiser scholars than himself have since engrafted on fruitful stocks; and in his 'first work of importance,' as Mr. Watson terms it, but which he might have more justly called his most important work, he indicated, if he did not exactly follow, the path that has led tortuously yet finally to the comparative theological liberty of the present age. Of his scholarship and theology

we shall frequently have occasion to speak; but here we may remark, that if by the term scholar we are to understand a Bentley, a Porson, a Scaliger, or a Hermann, that Warburton was not; and if by the term theologian we are supposed to mean a Jewel, a Hooker, a Taylor, or a Barrow, to that name also Warburton is not entitled. They stamped with their own image and superscription the sacred literature of their respective ages. He had no pretensions to the eloquence either of the pulpit, or of the Apology,' the 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' or the Liberty of 'Prophesying.' As little can Warburton claim to have been such a shepherd of the flock as Leighton, Ken, or Tillotson. Preaching he disliked, diocesan business was as little to his taste. The one interrupted his studies, the other ruffled his temper. His pen was in fact his crosier; his flock, the learned public. He wrote with his wonted asperity against those who believed too little and those who believed too much-against Papists and Methodists, against Socinians and Deists, but he made no attempt either by pulpit or pastoral arts to win them back to the Anglican fold. So busy a man as he was cannot be said to have indulged in the fat slumbers of the Church; yet the Church does not reckon in Warburton, whether as deacon, priest, or bishop, such a steward or minister as Paul would have approved. As a layman he might have composed any one of his many volumes or of his yet more numerous tracts; as a clergyman, the diocese of Gloucester was poorly furnished indeed if it contained no abler preacher or more active parish priest than its bishop. Indeed, among the regular luminaries of the time, whether scholars or divines, he moved like a comet, in an orbit of his own; and like a comet also, though he perplexed his contemporaries with fear and wonder, he blazed for a season only.

6

It is commonly said, apologetically, that the lives of scholars present few incidents for either biographers or readers. This, however, cannot be said of Warburton, and Mr. Watson judiciously opens his narrative without any apology of the kind. Though the writings of Bishop Warburton,' he remarks, produced no permanent effects either on literature or theology, yet the variety of subjects of which he treated, the display of intellectual energy in his pages, the number of ' eminent persons with whom he was brought into contact, and 'the scornful defiance with which he answered all that op'posed him, render his life a career that cannot be surveyed 'without interest.'

William Warburton was born at Newark in December 1698. His education has been called desultory, but, so far as

we can discover, it differed little if at all from the education of other lads of the time. For then the great foundation schools were reserved, with few exceptions, for the sons of noble and opulent houses, while the sons of the middle orders went to the nearest grammar-school, where the master might be a sound philologer like Dawes or Johnson of Nottingham, or a dunce like the tutor of Roderick Random. Warburton learned his accidence at a private academy, and to construe his Corderius, his Nepos, and such like branches of learning,' at the grammar-schools of Oakham and Newark. It may be presumed that he endured few or none of the hardships that rendered school life so painful in retrospect to Cowper, and that ultimately prompted him to write his Tirocinium' with much of the spirit and somewhat of the prejudice of Charles Churchill. For Warburton's first schoolmaster was his own brother-in-law, and his third his cousin and namesake. If they spared the boy out of respect for the family blood, it is by no means certain they did not spoil the man. Moderate flagellation might perhaps have taken some of the conceit out of master William. No early omens ushered in the future meteor of the literary firmament. One of his masters described him as the dullest of all dull scholars,' and could scarcely be made to believe that from so thick a skull came forth The Divine 'Legation!' Another said that he loved his book and his 'play as other boys do.' We could desire in this case to have the evidence of a boy from Oakham or Newark school. We suspect William to have been a bully.

His father was an attorney, and Warburton minor was destined to earn his bread by drawing wills and leases, and by hearing, consulting, and advising.' This, his early profession, was not forgotten by the foes he made in later years, but it is uncertain whether he practised the law after his apprenticeship expired. Rumour said that for a while he was a wine-merchant in Southwark, but, as sometimes happens, she was either misinformed or lied. The best-attested fact in his early history is that none of his kin, friends, or acquaintance formed any expectations of him, whether for evil or for good.

To have been bred an attorney and reputed a wine-merchant argues that the Warburtons, in 1698, inscribed their name among neither knights nor esquires; but if a decayed, they were an ancient house. They came into England with the Conqueror. Hudard or Odard may have heard Taillefer intone the Song of Roland to the Norman vanguard at Hastings. Sixth in descent from this Hudard, Sir Peter Dutton settled at Warburton, in Cheshire, and took the name of his abode.

One of the Duttons de Warburton was sheriff of Cheshire, and a knight of Henry VII.'s body-guard; another son of the sheriff's was Judge of the Common Pleas ; a third was created a baronet in 1660. Sir Peter Warburton, the last baronet of the family, died early in the present century. There is no evidence of Warburton's having ever boasted of his family tree, even when most pressed by the hunters; and this is to his credit, for he was not remarkable for humility. The civil wars turned one branch of the Warburtons into attorneys. They were Cavaliers, and paid the usual price for taking the loser's side. The future Bishop was the third of his race entitled to sign himself gentleman' by Act of Parliament.

Whatever opinions his friends may have entertained of him, Warburton himself was not without premonitions of his own possible career. He may not have aspired to a mitre or even a stall, but he saw in the Church the goal for which he sighed independence and leisure for a literary life. I know very 'well,' he said to friends taxing him as a dull uninventive companion, 'what you and others think of me; but I believe 'I shall one day or other convince the world that I am not so ignorant or so great a fool as I am taken to be.' Ignorant, in comparison with his associates in Newark, Warburton cannot have been even then, since to read and to meditate were his delight from his earliest years. He had begun, as Bishop Hurd learnt from him, while studying the law with Mr. Kirke, 'to manifest an extraordinary love of general reading: he found 'means to enlarge his acquaintance with the authors he had commenced at school.' He seems to have given some attention to mathematical and scientific studies, and before his clerkship was ended he had laid the foundation of the vast though irregular structure which he afterwards reared. As soon as his reading took a theological turn, he found an able and zealous assistant in his cousin William, his former master at Newark Grammar School. Of this assistance, which he partly repaid by serving him as under-master, he always spoke with gratitude, and he commemorated the learning and abilities of his kinsman in a long Latin epitaph. Four years after he had abandoned the law he took deacon's orders, but he seems to have been in no hurry to take the next step, since four years more expired before he was ordained priest. Neither the parish nor the cure which he served is known; but he was soon to obtain something far better than a curacy-a patron able and willing to advance him.

Sir Richard Sutton, a Lincolnshire baronet, had wit or luck