help to show that Warburton was to Pope what Hurd says of him in general-a useful as well as an agreeable guest. Although not a profound scholar, Pope was a person of much reading, and accordingly well able to appreciate and to enjoy the varied erudition of his new acquaintance. Of his earlier friends Arbuthnot was the most learned; Swift and the allaccomplished St. John,' powerful as the one was with the pen, and eloquent as the other was with pen and tongue, were each of them too much absorbed by politics to have much leisure for books; Gay was more a child than a man of genius, and Addison, perhaps a better scholar than any of these, was not one of the Twickenham coterie. There was, therefore, a vacancy in that brilliant circle which Warburton was well qualified to fill, and the real services, as well as the willing homage he rendered to Pope, recommended him at first, and before long endeared him to his illustrious friend.

'Mr.

Yet their intimacy is not without its mysteries. Warburton,' we are told in Spence's anecdotes, was, in Pope's judgment, the greatest general critic he ever knew-the most capable of seeing through all the possibilities of things.' Can this have been seriously meant by the author of the Essay on Criticism?' Of Pope's confidence in his friend there can be no question. At his instigation Pope added a fourth book to the Dunciad,' and made him his literary executor and legatee. He was awed by Warburton's erudition and enlivened by his active and versatile conversation. But can we believe that he really admired Warburton's style, or that so shrewd an observer failed to detect his literary character? For Pope, however superficial in Greek, had a very exact knowledge of the niceties of the Latin poets, and must surely have been aware that while Warburton's acquaintance with either Latin or Greek writers was unsound, his taste was on a level with a bullock-drover's. The causes which may have led Pope to regard The Divine Legation' as a péya laûpa of erudition are obvious. He wondered with the wonder of a savage or a child, because he was nearly as ignorant as a child or a savage of much that The Divine Legation' contained. We cannot help suspecting that as Warburton began their acquaintance with good service and extravagant compliments, so he continued to flatter, if not to fool, Pope to the top of his bent. On the other hand, Pope perceived that this literary leviathan might do him yet more service as a buckler or a bravo against his enemies. At a time when the earlier books of the Dunciad had nettled and stung whole coffee-houses of wits and small poets, Pope hired a tall Irishman to follow him when he walked

abroad. Was Warburton the literary successor of this muscular Milesian?

However this may have been, thenceforward they warred in common with both small and great. The poet refused a Doctor's degree from Oxford, because Oxford withheld that distinction from the divine. The vice-chancellor and the heads of houses were described as Apollo's mayor and aldermen. Warburton again, having foes of his own, bethought himself of an ingenious device for putting them to open shame. He induced Pope to write a fourth book of the Dunciad,' and to commit to himself the composition of the notes. It was as if Horace had taken Labienus into partnership. Those whom Warburton disliked-and their name was legion-Pope hitched into rhyme;' and those against whom Pope had a grudge, Warburton pelted with eggs and stale fish. The device was notorious. I thought,' said Lowth, in his Letter 'to Warburton' (p. 41), 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.' This free-warren of abuse was greatly extended when Pope appointed Warburton sole proprietor and editor of his works. Into his commentary, as into a common reservoir, he poured the tributaries of his wrath. That which originally was general he turned into personal satire. He fitted many caps to many heads. He made dunces of whom Pope had never heard; he revived or opened quarrels in which Pope had no concern; and whereas Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, years before, had dubbed Pope the 'wasp of Twickenham,' Pope's editor now turned his verses into a hornet's nest.

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Neither the satirist nor his commentator limited their attacks to the rats and mice and such small deer' as make up more than two-thirds of the heroes of the Dunciad.' Sometimes

they struck at nobler game. If it were fortunate for Pope to enlist such a henchman as Warburton, it was not less unfortunate for him to commit himself to internecine war with Bentley. The cause and the process of that feud belong to the history of Pope; we are concerned in them so far only as regards his ally.

In the complete edition of the Dunciad' (1743) appeared numerous notes bearing the signature of BENTLEY, and a dissertation, written by Warburton alone, was prefixed to it, purporting to be by Richardus Aristarchus upon the Hero of

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the Poem.' Bentley's manner was not hard to catch, yet the imitation of it, both in the dissertation and the notes, is more remarkable for buffoonery than fidelity, and does neither Pope who sanctioned, nor his fidus Achates who composed it, much credit. The whole conduct of Warburton towards Bentley was incongruous, and, indeed, disingenuous. Him, whatever may have been the real or the fancied grounds of Pope's enmity, Bentley had never assailed. Unlike Pope, Warburton knew well the worth of verbal criticism and philology, and held in high esteem the author of The Boyle Lectures' and The Dissertation on Phalaris.' Giving Mr. W. Greene, in 1738, advice on his studies, Warburton directs him to make ⚫ himself master of the best critics,' and signalises among them Joseph Scaliger, Casaubon, Lipsius, Turnebus, &c., but, above all, Dr. Bentley and Bishop Hare, who are the greatest men in this way that ever were.' It had suited Warburton's purpose, however, to maintain in The Divine Lega'tion' the genuineness of the laws of Zaleucus and Charondas, which Bentley, in his reply to Boyle, had proved to be spurious. Perhaps, also, as some good-natured friend had told Pope Bentley's opinion of his skill in Greek, so one of the same family may have imparted to Warburton Bentley's remark on The Divine Legation' This man has a voracious appetite for knowledge, but a very bad digestion.' If ever one man had cause for standing in dread of another, that man was Warburton, so long as Bentley lived. Yet it is nearly certain that, among other wild 'schemes, he intended to set himself up as Bentley's rival. In the second part of The 'Divine Legation,' Warburton's reply to Collins's book, ' On 'the Grounds of the Christian Religion,' is modelled on the celebrated answer by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis' to Collins's 'Discourse of Free Thinking.' In a long note to The Divine Legation,' he strives to convict Bentley of untruth. We need hardly say he labours in vain. Aristarchus was not particular about justice or truth in his litigation with Colbatch or fiddling Conyers,' but he was as scrupulous in dealing with ancient writers or texts as Porson himself. Warburton, in this as in so many other respects, was Bentley's opposite. There is always a good deal of risk in controverting, when he does not touch on matters of taste, an assertion made by Bentley, whereas in contradicting an assertion of Warburton's one rarely if ever runs any risk at all. Bentley often keeps in the background his strongest arguments; and many of his conclusions rest not immediately on any express authorities, but on profound and subtle combinations of the materials with

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which his boundless learning supplied him. Warburton, on the other hand, displays, and often drags all his forces in front, and when examined they prove to be men of straw, or such as desert on the first attack.* Perhaps, after all, love for Pope was the only motive for Warburton's hostility to Bentley. After the poet and the critic were both dead, these discreditable feelings disappear, and in the posthumous edition of Pope's works he expresses a wish-and we do not doubt its sincerityto render to the prince of English philology the justice he had never met with while alive, and applauds Hurd for his 'generous concern for the character of a truly great and much 'injured man.' †

Both from the notes on the Dunciad,' and from the appendices and supplements to The Divine Legation,' and, indeed, from every work of Warburton's of later date than The Alliance,' it would be easy to cull a tolerably-sized volume, which might properly be labelled 'The Beauties of Controversial Billingsgate.' On this field Warburton far outstripped Bentley, though he too was no mean proficient in the art of scolding. Mark, however, the difference. The one was, in all cases not relating to college politics, the assailed; the other was, in nearly every case, the assailant. Bentley excited the fears and drew upon himself the rage of the clergy by his proposals to restore the Nicene text of the New Testament to the rank held by the so-called received text' of Henry Stephens the printer. His project was met by volleys of ecclesiastical artillery. He replied to Middleton alone, since he, in allusion to the recently-exploded South-Sea scheme, had dubbed the prospectus Bentley's bubble.' He exposed the ignorance of Le Clerc by his extemporal emendations of that shallow critic's edition of the fragments of Menander and Philemon; but when James Gronovius-a Xantippe in breeches and De Pauw, whose character was as bad as Gronovius's temper, attacked him, Bentley folded his hands, and happily applied to them a line of Phædrus:

'Multo majoris colaphi mecum veneunt.'

But Warburton had few antagonists whom his own paradoxes and petulance did not originally evoke. Of these many, had he been discreet, he would have disregarded. Others of them he had reason to dread. Jortin was not a powerful foe, but he

* Museum Philologicum, vol. i. p. 8.

Letters from a late eminent Prelate to one of his Friends, 8vo.

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was an accurate and elegant scholar, well informed in Church history, and quick to detect and able to expose Warburton's slips in philosophy or divinity. Henry Taylor, again, though his pen was inferior to Jortin's, was a man of sound learning, and such men are ever dangerous' to omnivorous readers. Edwards, from whose Canons of Criticism' we have already quoted, was a harder hitter than either Taylor or Jortin, and before he published his Canons' he had convicted Warburton, and that at Ralph Allen's table, perhaps in the presence of Gertrude his wife, of misconstruing Greek through the delusive medium of a French translation. That such a slave as this Edwards-who, to make matters worse, if possible, was not a man of the gown, but a man of the sword-a captain bold in 'country quarters '-should go unpunished, was a question not to be asked. Ad leones-into the Dunciad with him '—and there he is even unto this day. But not even the pillory will silence some varlets, and Edwards survived to take ample re

venge.

But among Warburton's adversaries, none was half so formidable as Lowth. In his own country he was the first Hebraist of his time; he was an accurate and elegant scholar also; he was a sound theologian; he was well versed in literature generally; his style was scarcely inferior to Addison's, and far superior to Hurd's; while his irony was little less cutting than Pascal's. That which Swift in his Battle of the Books' writes of the duel between Bentley and Boyle is nearly applicable to the passages of arms between Warburton and Lowth:

The captain (of the moderns), whose name was B-ntl-y, was tall but without shape or comeliness; large but without strength or proportion. His armour was patcht up of a thousand incoherent pieces his helmet of old rusty iron, but the vizard was brass.' 'Boyle, clad in a suit of armour which had been given him by all the gods, advanced against the foe with a lance of wondrous length and sharpness, and pinned his arms to his side, &c.'

The first offence given by Lowth to Warburton was slight, and easily pardoned-he detected him in plagiarism from Milton's Areopagitica;' the second was of a graver and less venial kind--he refuted Warburton's opinions on the Book of Job. His other sins against the majesty of Aristarchus were without number. We can afford room for only one of them as a sample of the rest :

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You give yourself out,' said this injurious Bishop, as ' demonstrator of the Divine Legation of Moses; it has often 'been demonstrated before: a young student in theology might undertake to give a better-that is, a more satisfactory