336

GENERAL MERITS OF THE BOOK.

bold forms, the shadowy Appenines. Gaze and go back, English! Naples, with all its beauties and its pleasures, its treasury of ruins, and recollections, and fair works of art; its soft music and balmy airs cannot make you happy; may gratify the gaze of taste, but never suit the habits of your mind. There are many homeless solitary Englishmen who might sojourn longer in such scenes, and be soothed by them; but to become dwellers, settled residents, would be, even for them, impossible."—Ibid. pp. 301–303.

We must break off here- though there is much temptation to go on. But we have now shown enough of these volumes to enable our readers to judge safely of their character-and it would be unfair, perhaps, to steal more from their pages. We think we have extracted impartially; and are sensible, at all events, that we have given specimens of the faults as well as the beauties of the author's style. His taste in writing certainly is not unexceptionable. He is seldom quite simple or natural, and sometimes very fade and affected. He has little bits of inversions in his sentences, and small exclamations and ends of ordinary verse dangling about them, which we often wish away and he talks rather too much of himself, and his ignorance, and humility, while he is turning those fine sentences, and laying traps for our applause. But, in spite of all these things, the books are very interesting and instructive; and their merits greatly outweigh their defects. If the author has occasional failures, he has frequent felicities; — and, independent of the many beautiful and brilliant passages which he has furnished for our delight, has contrived to breathe over all his work a spirit of kindliness and contentment, which, if it does not minister (as it ought) to our improvement, must at least disarm our censure of all bitterness.

Letters from a late eminent Prelate to one of his Friends. 4to. pp. 380. Kidderminster:, 1808.

WARBURTON, we think, was the last of our Great Divines -the last, perhaps, of any profession, among us, who united profound learning with great powers of understanding, and, along with vast and varied stores of acquired knowledge, possessed energy of mind enough to wield them with ease and activity. The days of the Cudworths and Barrows-the Hookers and Taylors, are long gone by. Among the other divisions of intellectual labour to which the progress of society has given birth, the business of reasoning, and the business of collecting knowledge, have been, in a great measure, put into separate hands. Our scholars are now little else than pedants, and antiquaries, and grammarians, who have never exercised any faculty but memory; and our reasoners are, for the most part, but slenderly provided with learning; or, at any rate, make but a slender use of it in their reasonings. Of the two, the reasoners are by far the best off; and, upon many subjects, have really profited by the separation. Argument from authority is, in general, the weakest and the most tedious of all arguments; and learning, we are inclined to believe, has more frequently played the part of a bully than of a fair auxiliary; and been oftener used to frighten people than to convince them, to dazzle and overawe, rather than to guide and enlighten. A modern writer would not, if he could, reason as Barrow and Cudworth often reason; and every reader, even of Warburton, must have felt that his learning often encumbers rather than assists his progress, and, like shining armour, adds more to his terrors than to his strength. The true theory of this separation may be, therefore, that scholars who are

338

WARBURTON

A GIANT.

capable of reasoning, have ceased to make a parade of their scholarship; while those who have nothing else must continue to set it forward-just as gentlemen now-a-days keep their gold in their pockets, instead of wearing it on their clothes- while the fashion of laced suits still prevails among their domestics. There are individuals, however, who still think that a man of rank looks most dignified in cut velvet and embroidery, and that one who is not a gentleman can now counterfeit that appearance a little too easily. We do not presume to settle so weighty a dispute;-we only take the liberty of observing, that Warburton lived to see the fashion go out; and was almost the last native gentleman who appeared in a full trimmed coat.

He was not only the last of our reasoning scholars, but the last also, we think, of our powerful polemics. This breed too, we take it, is extinct;—and we are not sorry for it. Those men cannot be much regretted, who, instead of applying their great and active faculties in making their fellows better or wiser, or in promoting mutual kindness and cordiality among all the virtuous and enlightened, wasted their days in wrangling upon idle theories; and in applying, to the speculative errors of their equals in talents and in virtue, those terms of angry reprobation which should be reserved for vice and malignity. In neither of these characters, therefore, can we seriously lament that Warburton is not likely to have

any successor.

The truth is, that this extraordinary person was a Giant in literature- with many of the vices of the Gigantic character. Strong as he was, his excessive pride and overweening vanity were perpetually engaging him in enterprises which he could not accomplish; while such was his intolerable arrogance towards his opponents, and his insolence towards those whom he reckoned as his inferiors, that he made himself very generally and deservedly odious, and ended by doing considerable injury to all the causes which he undertook to support. The novelty and the boldness of his manner- the resentment of his antagonists- and the consternation of

HIS PERSONAL HISTORY.

339

his friends, insured him a considerable share of public attention at the beginning: But such was the repulsion of his moral qualities as a writer, and the fundamental unsoundness of most of his speculations, that he no sooner ceased to write, than he ceased to be read or inquired after, and lived to see those erudite volumes fairly laid on the shelf, which he fondly expected to carry down a growing fame to posterity.

The history of Warburton, indeed, is uncommonly curious, and his fate instructive. He was bred an attorney at Newark; and probably derived, from his early practice in that capacity, that love of controversy, and that habit of scurrility, for which he was afterwards distinguished. His first literary associates were some of the heroes of the Dunciad; and his first literary adventure the publication of some poems, which well entitled him to a place among those worthies. He helped "pilfering Tibbalds" to some notes upon Shakspeare; and spoke contemptuously of Mr. Pope's talents, and severely of his morals, in his letters to Concannen. He then hired his pen to prepare a volume on the Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery; and having now entered the church, made a more successful endeavour to magnify his profession, and to attract notice to himself by the publication of his once famous book on "the Alliance between Church and State," in which all the presumption and ambition of his nature was first made manifest.

By this time, however, he seems to have passed over from the party of the Dunces to that of Pope; and proclaimed his conversion pretty abruptly, by writing an elaborate defence of the Essay on Man, from some imputations which had been thrown on its theology and morality. Pope received the services of this voluntary champion with great gratitude; and Warburton having now discovered that he was not only a great poet, but a very honest man, continued to cultivate his friendship with great assiduity, and with very notable success: For Pope introduced him to Mr. Murray, who made him preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and to Mr. Allen of Prior Park, who gave him his niece in marriage, obtained a

340 WARBURTON SERIES OF HIS PUBLICATIONS.

bishopric for him, and left him his whole estate. In the mean time, he published his "Divine Legation of Moses," the most learned, most arrogant, and most absurd work, which had been produced in England for a century; and his editions of Pope, and of Shakspeare, in which he was scarcely less outrageous and fantastical. He replied to some of his answerers in a style full of insolence and brutal scurrility; and not only poured out the most tremendous abuse on the infidelities of Bolingbroke and Hume, but found occasion also to quarrel with Drs. Middleton, Lowth, Jortin, Leland, and indeed almost every name distinguished for piety and learning in England. At the same time, he indited the most highflown adulation to Lord Chesterfield, and contrived to keep himself in the good graces of Lord Mansfield and Lord Hardwicke; — while, in the midst of affluence and honours, he was continually exclaiming against the barbarity of the age in rewarding genius so frugally, and in not calling in the aid of the civil magistrate to put down fanaticism and infidelity. The public, however, at last, grew weary of these blustering novelties. The bishop, as old age stole upon him, began to doze in his mitre; and though Dr. Richard Hurd, with the true spirit of an underling, persisted in keeping up the petty traffic of reciprocal encomiums, yet Warburton was lost to the public long before he sunk into dotage, and lay dead as an author for many years of his natural exist

ence.

We have imputed this rapid decline of his reputation, partly to the unsoundness of his general speculations, and chiefly to the offensiveness of his manner. The fact is admitted even by those who pretend to regret it; and, whatever Dr. Hurd may have thought, it must have had other causes than the decay of public virtue and

taste.

In fact, when we look quietly and soberly over the vehement and imposing treatises of Warburton, it is scarcely possible not to perceive, that almost every thing that is original in his doctrine or propositions is erroneous; and that his great gifts of learning and argument