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he had conceived the idea of The Divine Legation.' A proud and happy man was he when the vision first opened upon him. 'Sistimus: hic tandem nobis ubi defuit orbis.' Here was a theme in comparison with which that of The Dissertation on Phalaris' was poor and trivial, and Cudworth's Intellectual System' a mere episode in philosophical theology. Here was

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a subject grand in aspect, elastic in texture; a home at length for his devious reading; a magnet to attract his swarming paradoxes; a hidden treasure, of which he alone among the sons of men held the key.

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A warm admirer of Warburton, long after the grave had closed upon his labours, says that to the composition of this prodigious work'-the epithet is not ill chosen- Hooker and Stillingfleet could have contributed the erudition; Chilling'worth 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 imagination except ' that of Warburton could first have amassed all these materials, and then have compacted them into a bulky and elaborate work so consistent and harmonious?' This panegyric has but one fault-it is incorrect from beginning to end. Warburton's reading was enormous; his vigour both in thought and words was extraordinary; his logical powers were remarkable; and he was unquestionably endued with keenness of vision and sharpness of wit. Some of his guesses-that of the true law for interpreting hieroglyphics, for example-were eminently happy, and have since been partly confirmed by research and better knowledge; and some of the principles he announced or maintained were in advance of his age. So far we go with his admirer, but we protest against the terms of his panegyric. For erudition' we propose multifarious read'ing,' a very different matter. Acuteness' he possessed in no small measure, but his was not the eagle eye of a Scaliger or a Bentley, piercing the mists and integuments of error, and surprising dark places with light, so much as the faculty of seeing in twilight, and often of fancying that he saw. Taylor's imagi'nation' is to Warburton's what the robe of a king is to a robe of motley; and as to wit like Swift's or perhaps Eachard's,' Warburton was rather humorous than witty, and more coarse or grotesque than humorous. We deny not that he compacted a bulky and elaborate work,' but the epithets consistent and harmonious' are about as applicable to The Divine Legation' as witty and humorous would be to the Thirty-nine Articles. That celebrated work was founded on paradox, and paradox was the Cleopatra which always ensnared its author. Paradox was as

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much a portion of his intellect as bones and muscles were of his body. A fact, a theory, an hypothesis that presented itself to him, or which he could present to others, under some strange and startling shape, or was of so elastic a nature as to bend and wind through infinite analogies, he took at once under his protection. But theories, laws, and facts that demanded scientific method, or involved accurate learning, were as unpalatable to him as a Samaritan to a Jew.

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Warburton's admirer has omitted one commendatory epithet which he might justly have employed when writing of The 'Divine Legation,' and that epithet is amusing.' They who take up that work for the first time, expecting to find it a dry theological argument, will be much and agreeably disappointed. Johnson said truly when speaking of it, The table is always full, sir. He brings things from the north and the south, and 'from every quarter. In his "Divine Legation" you are 'always entertained. He carries you round and round with'out carrying you forward to the point, but you have no wish 'to be carried forward.' If one be not particular about the premises or coherence of the parts-conclusion there is noneit is a singularly amusing' work. Often perverse and always paradoxical, Warburton is never dull, except in his sermons. He abounds in agreeable surprises; keeps the reader in con tinual suspense as to what the writer will think of next; whirls him about in currents of analogies; blinds him with the speed and brilliance of his illustrations. Nor does the Bishop restrict himself to Moses or the pagan philosophers. Modern and recent authors on nearly every question of Church or State pass under review or are caught in the meshes of this vast dragnet. The Divine Legation,' says Lowth, it seems, 'contains in it all knowledge, divine and human, ancient and 'modern: it is a perfect encyclopædia, including all history, criticism, divinity, law, politics, from the law of Moses down to the Jew Bill, and from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern rebus-writing.' In the 2,041 pages of the unfinished "Divine Legation,' "observes Gibbon, four hundred authors are quoted, from St. Austin down to Scarron and Rabelais.' The digressions are out of all proportion to the main argument. The author makes, where he cannot find, occasion to deviate from the straight path. His work is the most extraordinary of literary kaleidoscopes a turn of the wrist conveys the reader from Thebes and its hundred gates to Whitfield's Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road: from the Tabernacle to the shrine of the mighty mother at Eleusis or at Sais; from the shrine of the ineffable mystery to Rehoboth or Ebenezer Chapel; from

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the Chapel, in a dingy alley of London, to the groves of Academus or the wilderness of Sinai.

They, on the other hand, who take up The Divine Lega'tion' in the hope of understanding better either the Jewish or Christian dispensation, will be greatly, but not again agreeably, disappointed. It neither justifies Moses for omitting from his law a future state of rewards and punishment, nor corroborates Paul or the Evangelists for asserting it. It is a mighty maze without a plan; a huge storehouse of miscellaneous learning and unconnected or even spasmodic thought. Coleridge aptly characterised the author of it as the idea-less, thought-swarming Warburton.' The further we advance from the beginning, the further off the end of the argument appears. Its windows exclude the light; its passages lead to nothing. Although the Ecclesiastical Polity remains a fragment, and although its later books have probably been tampered with, we can discern through its stately exordium what would have been the nave, the aisles, the corridors, of which that exordium is the portal. The Apology' of Jewel, though laden with obsolete ornaments from the schoolmen, does not bewilder us by an eccentric ground-plan. The Liberty of Prophesying, though written in haste, and when its author was far away from books, is scarcely less orderly in its course, or less lucid in its arrangements, than if Taylor had been sitting at his parsonage at Uppingham, far from the noise of war, and surrounded by the Fathers and the Schoolmen, and the tall folios with which Rome, Geneva, Lambeth, and Westminster waged their dogmatic wars. Warburton, however, could not move on the solemn and sequacious' line of his great precursors. He was indeed the Phaethon of controversy, and his coursers were scarcely more obedient to his rein than were Pyroeis, Eous, et Æthon' to that of the son of Clymene.

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Expatiantur equi; nulloque inhibente per auras

Ignotæ regionis eunt: quaque impetus egit

Hac sine lege ruunt, rapiuntque per æthera currum.
Et modo summa petunt, modo per decliva viasque
Præcipites spatio terræ propiore feruntur.'

It is characteristic of the author and his work, that while the main object of it attracted little attention, when it did not awaken grave suspicions of his faith, the episodes excited lively interest. Among these the inquiry into the nature and design of the Eleusinian Mysteries' was just the sort of lure that Warburton's ever-swarming fancy was certain to catch-the gloaming light in which he delighted to walk. The subject was without beginning or end. Any passage of almost any

writer, whether he had composed an Orphic hymn or a philosophical dialogue, whether he were a ritualist or a lawgiver, might be strained or coaxed into an illustration of the great secret. Seneca was not too heavy, or Plautus too light, for an auxiliary. There seems, indeed, to have been a sort of craze * in the last century on the theme of mythological enigmas-a craze that passed over the houses of the true Israelites in philology, such as Bentley, but terribly vexed such Egyptians as Bryant and Warburton. A treatise on Pagan theology would have interested the learned only, and after a while have reposed on the shelves with the volumes of the Abbé Banier' and Gébelin's Monde Primitif.' But Warburton's aim was to astonish learned and unlearned, Greek and barbarian, throughout Christendom. The attempt to solve the great mystery must accordingly be engrafted on a stock in which even Turks and Jews, no less than Christians, had an interest-the doctrine or the theory of a future state. Pan accordingly lent to Moses his wreathed horn. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were familiar to the faithful and the infidel. Their author, indeed, had no particular fellowship with Cybele or Ceres, with the pure theism of the Dorian Apollo or the orgiastic rites of the Eastern Iacchus. But that mattered little. Moses was a legislator and a ritualist; his religion, like the composite creeds of Chaldæa and Egypt, had an inner shrine; it veiled under concrete forms abstract truths, and had fed equally the dreams of the Rabbins and the speculations of Philo and the Alexandrian sages. The most ancient form of theosophy, it still affected, and even in some degree shaped, the sacred and secular polity of the civilised world. Here, then, was an argosy, freighted with wares of every kind, from the gold of Ophir to the beads and toys which delight the children of nature, awaiting a pilot bent to explore the islands of Alcinous or the great continent of Atlantis. If there be among our readers anyone disposed to investigate the questions which occupied Warburton in the last or Creuzer in the present century, we recommend him, before he plunges into the fog and swamps wherein they floundered and groped, to study so much of Lobeck's Aglaophamus-it is only one of three sections of his book-as relates to this theological or mythological

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Eschenbach in his Preface to the Argonautic Hymns says, with reference to the Mysteries, In abyssum quendam mysteriorum de* scendere videbar, quum silente mundo vigilantibus astris et luna istos hymnos in manus sumpsi. A becoming prelude to speculations on moonshine.

arcanum. If, after so reading, he perseveres in the search, we shall applaud his patience and envy his leisure.

Never, probably, did a work intended to rank among the propugnacula of revealed religion end more lamely and impotently. The seventh and eighth books, though the materials for them were collected, were never written. The ninth is not merely incomplete, but also a mere patchwork of feeble sermons and expiring paradoxes. It is impossible not to sympathise with the author in the disappointment he felt and owned to friendly ears. When in good spirits and yet hopeful of extricating himself from the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed, he wrote:

"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.'

The end never came, but many things came that harassed Warburton's days, and exhausted his intellect. Far from being accounted a champion of the faith, he was suspected of being its assailant. His temerity shocked many pious minds, and surprised even infidels. Dr. Balguy, who admired and did justice to Warburton, confessed to him that there was one thing in the argument of "The Divine Legation" that stuck more with candid men than all the rest-how a religion, ' without a future state, could be worthy of God!' Churchill, who neither did him justice nor admired him, writes:

To make himself a man of note,
He in defence of Scripture wrote:
So long he wrote, and long about it,
That e'en believers 'gan to doubt it.'

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Warburton laid the blame of his failure on the clergy. indeed the published volumes of the D. L. be so weak and mischievous as they suppose, I will not add to the offence 'given them by adding any more.' In a letter to Birch—' busy Tom Birch,' as Johnson called him-he paints his feelings more sincerely:-

'I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month, and from year to year.' 'Distractions of various kinds, inseparable from human life, joined with a naturally