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enough to be employed as a diplomatist, and had been sent on a mission to Constantinople. His acquaintance with Warburton seems to have begun in the latter's chrysalis stage of attorney's clerk. It was improved by his protégé dedicating to him his first publication, entitled Miscellaneous Translations in Prose ' and Verse, from Roman Orators and Historians.' The name and virtues of the Suttons were, as the manner then was, duly emblazoned in a dedication that reads and is arranged like an epitaph. Priscian's head is more than once broken in this lapidary composition. Ten years afterwards, indeed, he had acquired considerable command of the Latin language, but he always wrote it in a fashion that would shock a fourth-form boy at Eton, and have made Quintilian stare and gasp.' the translations, those in prose were only better than those in verse because those in verse were as bad as they could be. He should be a book-hunter luckier and more keen-scenting than Monkbarn's hero, snuffy Davie' himself, who could now find this volume on a stall. Even the memory of it would have perished utterly, for the author cast it off, had not Dr. Parr, in a fit of spleen against Bishop Hurd, maliciously reprinted it in his quarto of Tracts by a Warburtonian.' The dedication, however, served its purpose; Sir Richard Sutton either did not detect or did not resent the blunders of the Latin or the baldness of the English, and procured for Warburton the small living of Greasely, in Nottinghamshire, which, we conjecture for the use of studious youth' in orders, Mr. Watson states to be now worth about 1347. a year, and in the gift of Lord 'Palmerston.'

Biography is never more usefully employed than when it can record the formative period of the lives of men set apart for distinction. Horace has lifted the curtain from his own boyhood; of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Luther, thanks either to their own industry or vanity, or to the curiosity and zeal of their friends, we know nearly all we can reasonably desire. Milton's years of ceaseless reading;' Gray's seclusion with his Virgil; Newton's meditations on his farm; Gibbon's studies at Lausanne and Petersfield; Wordsworth's early communings with nature; Chantrey's and Wilkie's prolusions with sticks blackened in the fire upon the whitewashed walls of a cottage, have braced the nerves and cheered the spirits of many a student and many an artist while obeying the instincts of their being amid difficulties, discouragement, and disappointment. But Warburton has not left even a sketch of himself at this period, nor did any of his friends think it worth their while to inquire into and put on record his

early habits or pursuits. That he had always a voracious appetite for learning there is no reason to doubt; his writings attest, his family and associates record, his close addiction to study, and an ill-natured pen confirms these family and friendly traditions. Churchill, with much venom, if with some truth, writes of him :—

'A curate first he read and read

And laid in—while he should have fed
The souls of his neglected flock-
Of reading 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.'

The rebuke came with an ill grace from one who, though he possessed some rugged virtues, set a good example to others neither while he wore, nor after he had cast off, his gown and cassock. And we ought to bear in mind that such neglect of duty was at the time a rule with few exceptions. The Anglican Church, in the eighteenth century, contained some bright examples of learning and holy living, but it was not generally conspicuous for its cure of souls. While Warburton was hiving knowledge with each studious year,' the majority of his clerical brethren were, if in London, attending levées, or, if in the country, hunting with the squire in the morning, and drinking the squire's October in the evening. Of parsons not so highly favoured, the tavern was the club, and the squire's lawyer, bailiff, and huntsman were the companions. Clerical zeal appeared in abusing Wesley and Whitfield; clerical learning in sermons which sent the hearers of them to sleep; and clerical charity in thinking no evil of such as resorted to the parish church on the day of rest and frequented the parish alehouse on the days of labour. We do not apologise for Warburton's deficiencies as steward and minister; but if it is not well to leave the sheep in the wilderness, even that is better than leading them to the tavern.

It is not certain whether he ever resided at Greasely, which, indeed, he held little more than a year. In June, 1728, Sir Robert Sutton presented Warburton with the living of BrantBroughton, near Newark, of the value of 5607. a year; and in 1730 he was appointed by the Duke of Newcastle, probably through the same friendly baronet's influence, to the living of Frisby, in Lincolnshire, worth about 250l. a year,' which he continued to hold, though never residing on it, until 1756. He was now a rich man, for his wants were few and

his habits were almost eremitical. In his parsonage at BrantBroughton were spent Warburton's happiest days. He was enabled to offer his mother and sisters a comfortable home; he enjoyed almost unbroken leisure for study, and he, for a while, awakened none of the animosities which embittered his later years. In any review of Warburton's character it is always agreeable to regard him apart from authorship. It was said of Garrick :

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'Twas only that when he was off he was acting."

The reverse may be said of Warburton. Before the public he was violent and supercilious to a degree beyond that of Joseph Scaliger, and in a measure scarcely exceeded by Scioppius. His scolding in English was on a par with their railing in Latin. Nor did he disdain petty tricks or mean advantages, when by employing them he could get the better of an opponent or appease his own hunger for praise. In private with his friends he was natural, easy, unpretending, as ready to listen as to talk, as willing to receive as to impart knowledge. In the family circle he was a pious and loving son, a kind and liberal brother a fond if not a discreet father, and an indulgent, his enemies averred an obedient, husband. He describes himself as melancholy in temperament, but we suspect that his sedentary habits, though he was one of the most abstinent of men, had much to do with his occasional fits of depression. His family not liking, or perhaps not daring, to abridge his studies, were wont to employ little arts for his benefit. Fearful

that such continuance of study must at length bring on 'disease, his mother and sisters would sometimes invite them'selves to take coffee in his library with him after dinner, and 'contrived to make their stay with him as long as possible; but when they retired they always found that he returned again to his books, and continued at them till the demands of sleep obliged him to retire.'

We must not quit Warburton's family circle for the stormy region of his literary life without some notice of his extraordinary theory of what constitutes a good wife, and also some account of Mrs. Warburton. Just a year before he quitted Brant-Broughton he married Miss Gertrude Tucker, the favourite niece of Ralph Allen of Prior Park, near Bath. The name of Allen was known to contemporaries by his improvements in the management of the cross-posts, and lives with posterity through his having furnished Fielding with the original of Squire Allworthy, and by Pope's couplet embalming his real name,—

'Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame,

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.'

Pope, when he introduced Warburton at Prior Park, meant only to provide his sturdy henchman with a useful friend and an occasional home; but he actually purveyed for him a wife and a mitre. Allen, by his influence at Bath, had made the elder William Pitt member for that city, and Pitt returned the favour by making Allen's friend, and then nephew by marriage, first Dean of Bristol and afterwards Bishop of Gloucester. Pope, again, saw a certain fitness of things in connecting the ex-farmer of the cross-posts with one whom alone among critics he held in honour; and after persuading Warburton to propose, he induced the uncle and niece to consent. Mr. De Quincy admits the fact that William Wordsworth married, but refuses to believe on any testimony that he ever courted Mary his wife. We are not told whether William Warburton was hard to persuade to do what his adviser never did, or whether Pope did the courting for him. He was not, however, one of those who as having eyes see not, since he described the lady to Bowyer the printer as one of the finest women in England,' adding an antithesis becoming The 'Divine Legation,' to whom to offer up his freedom was to be 'more than free.' But had Miss Gertrude Tucker seen in time a letter of Warburton's written fifteen years before to Dr. Stukeley, she might have paused, and few would have blamed her for pausing, on the very threshold of Hymen's temple. The letter, at least the extract from it given by Mr. Watson, is so extraordinary-so truly Warburtonian-that we cannot deny our readers the pleasure or the surprise it will afford them:

'You must know, my good doctor, that I regard woman in her natural state as one of those odd pictures that I have formerly seen at Oxford, which they use for a very pretty experiment in optics. They produce you a board, on the plane of which is thrown together a great number of colours, as it appears, with the utmost confusion and disorder, the most visible work of chance. But by applying to it a cylindrical steel mirror, there immediately rises on its bosom a beautiful reflected form in all the justness and artifice of design. A woman is this coloured table; in whose capricious and variable fancy discordant and monstrous ideas are, by the force of the passions, whimsically daubed on at random, which present no mark of the workmanship of the great plastic nature. But if, happily, a prudent husband be applied, he does the business of the cylinder. The scattered lines are now reduced in order; an elegance of design arises, and the reflected union of colours and harmony of light and shadow speak the workmanship divine.'

Budæus studied as usual on his wedding-day; an offended fair one bade Rousseau Go and study your mathematics, for in love-making you are an idiot;' and Gibbon took an eternal farewell (as he thought) of Mdlle. Susan Curchod as coolly as if he had been discharging an incapable cook. John Kemble, after the curtain fell in the evening, forgot that on the morning of the same day he had acquired a wife and also a mother-inlaw; and Richard Porson spent the evening of his weddingday with a learned friend without communicating to him the recent existence of Mrs. P., or stirring from his chair until the chimes rang midnight. Whether the Cymon of BrantBroughton had been reclaimed from rusticity by the Iphigenia of Prior Park, and therefore recollected at the proper season he was no longer sole and single, we are not told. The match, however, appears not to have been an ill-assorted one. There were indeed scandals at Bath about Iphigenia; but inasmuch as Horace Walpole is one of the circulators of them, and the city of Bladud was then, whatever it may be now, the School for Scandal, we shall imitate Mr. Watson's discretion and not inquire too curiously about a certain Mr. Thomas Potter, who though he were son of the Primate of England, even of him who wrote The Antiquities of Greece,' was also one of the monks of Medmenham Abbey in the days when John Wilkes was Lord Abbot.

Of this marriage the issue was a son, who died of consumption in his twentieth year. Warburton's schemes for his son's profession are characteristic of the man, and betoken a slender amount of respect for his own calling. Being asked,' Mr. Malone has told us, to what profession he should devote his son, Warburton said he would determine according to his ability. If he proved himself a lad of good parts, he should make him a lawyer; if but mediocre, he should breed him a physician; but that if he turned out a very dull fellow, he should put him into the Church.' Dr. Parr once delivered himself of a very similar triad: Of the three professions physicians are the most learned, lawyers the most entertaining-then comes my profession.' Truly, our common mother,' as she is sometimes styled by more devout or discreet members than either of these most learned doctors, is very little beholden either to Warburton or the Warburtonian.'

Of the eighteen years (1728-46) spent in the retirement of his parsonage, varied by occasional visits to London and to Prior Park, where there was a well-stocked library as well as abundant leisure, the principal fruits were The Alliance be'tween Church and State' (1736), and the first two volumes of