tions to which he was indifferent. Yet, with all these inconsistencies, added to the affectation, equally discernible in the editor of Pope and Shakespeare, of understanding the poet better than he understood himself, there sometimes appear, in the rational intervals of his critical delirium, elucidations so happy and disquisitions so profound, that our admiration of the poet, (even of such a poet,) is suspended for a moment while we dwell on the excellencies of the commentator.

The nature of Warburton's early circumstances, and the gradual developement of his talents, naturally threw him, in the outset of his career, into the hands of the inferior wits, or, as they were then injuriously called, the Dunces. This, however, lasted not long, and the correspondent of Theobald and Concanen, (a connection which he delighted not to remember,) became in no long period the friend of Murray, Yorke and Pope. But there was one connection of which so erroneous an account has been given by his biographer, and so very improper an use was made by himself, that we owe it to the memory of an amiable and upright man, whom in his edition of Shakespeare he pursues with unrelenting rancour under the name of the Oxford Editor, to state what appears to be the truth.

With this view,' (as we are assured by Dr. Hurd, namely, that of a projected edition of Shakespeare,) he (Sir Thomas Hanmer,) got himself introduced to Mr. Warburton by the Bishop of Salisbury, and managed so well as to draw from his new acquaintance a large collection of notes and emendations. What followed upon this, and what use he made of these friendly communications, I need not repeat, as the account is given by Mr. Warburton himself in the lively preface to his and Mr.' Pope's edition of Shakespeare; and thus ended this trifling affair.'

Lively stories, and their equally lively relators, are sometimes apt to be deficient in a quality for which the other party in this trifling affair was eminently distinguished. Sir Thomas Hanmer was a man of probity and honor, had long been speaker of the House of Commons, and died with unimpeached integrity in a dignified retirement; notwithstanding all which, he might, when he was supposed to be past the power of answering for himself, have been traduced to posterity as a wretched pilferer from Warburton's critical portfolio, had not an anonymous advocate of departed merit, whom we strongly suspect to have been George Steevens, circulated, through the medium of a popular newspaper, an original letter from himself to Dr. Joseph Smith, then provost of Queen's College, Oxford. This we have fortunately by us, and shall oppose an extract from it to the account of the two right reverend, critics, intreating the reader's indulgence if it be not found quite so lively as either.

My

1

My acquaintance with him, (Warburton),' says Hanmer, 'began upon an application from himself, and , at his request, introduced him to me, for this purpose only, as was then declared, that as he had many observations from Shakespeare lying by him, over and above those printed in Theobald's book, he much desired to communicate them to me, that I might judge whether any of them were worthy to be added to those emendations which he had understood that I had long been making upon that author;-upon which a long correspondence began by letter, in which he explained many passages, which sometimes I thought just, but mostly wild and out of the way. Not long after, views of interest began to shew themselves. Several hints were dropt of the advantage he might receive from publishing the work thus corrected, but, &c. &c. Upon this he flew into a great rage, and there is an end of the story.'

But our concern with Warburton is principally as an author;the warmth of his domestic attachments, the fidelity of his friendship, the fierceness and terror of his hostility, otherwise than as they affect the tone and spirit of his writings, belong not to

us.

His whole constitution, bodily as well as mental, seemed to indicate that he was born to be an extraordinary man: with a large and athletic person he prevented the necessity of such bodily exercises as strong constitutions usually require, by rigid and undeviating abstinence. The time thus saved was uniformly devoted to study, of which no measure or continuance ever exhausted his understanding or checked the natural and lively flow of his spirits. A change in the object of his pursuit was his only relaxation; and he could pass and repass from fathers and philosophers to Don Quixote, in the original, with perfect ease and pleasure. In the mind of Warburton the foundation of classical literature had been well laid, yet not so as to enable him to pursue the science of ancient criticism with an exactness equal to the extent in which he grasped it. His master-faculty was reason, and his master-science was theology; the very outline of which last, as marked out by this great man, for the direction of young students, surpasses the attainments of many who have the reputation of considerable divines. One deficiency of his education he had carefully corrected by cultivating logic with great diligence. That he has · sometimes mistaken the sense of his own citations in Greek, may perhaps be imputed to a purpose of bending them to his own opinions. After all, he was incomparably the worst critic in his mother tongue. Little acquainted with old English literature, and as little with those provincial dialects which yet retain much of the phraseology of Shakespeare, he has exposed himself to the derision of far inferior judges by mistaking the sense of passages, in which he would have been corrected by shepherds and plowmen. His

sense

sense of humour, like that of most men of very vigorous faculties, was strong, but extremely coarse, while the rudeness and vulgarity of his manners as a controvertist removed all retraints of decency or decorum in scattering his jests about him. His taste seems to have been neither just nor delicate. He had nothing of that intuitive perception of beauty which feels rather than judges, and yet is sure to be followed by the common suffrage of mankind: on the contrary his critical favours were commonly bestowed according to rules and reasons, and for the most part according to some perverse and capricious reasons of his own. In short, it may be adduced as one of those compensations with which Providence is ever observed to balance the excesses and superfluities of its own gifts, that there was not a faculty about this wonderful man which does not appear to have been distorted by a certain inexplicable perverseness, in which pride and love of paradox were blended with the spirit of subtle and sophistical reasoning. In the lighter exercises of his faculties it may not unfrequently be doubted whether he believed himself; in the more serious, however fine-spun his theories may have been, he was unquestionably honest. On the whole, we think it a fair subject of speculation, whether it were desirable that Warburton's education and early habits should have been those of other great scholars. That the ordinary forms of scholastic institution would have been for his own benefit and in some respects for that of mankind, there can be no doubt. The gradations of an University would, in part, have mor tified his vanity and subdued his arrogance. The perpetual collisions of kindred and approximating minds, which constitute, perhaps, the great excellence of those illustrious seminaries, would have rounded off some portion of his native asperities; he would have been broken by the academical curb to pace in the trammels of ordinary ratiocination; he would have thought always above, yet not altogether unlike, the rest of mankind. In short, he would have become precisely what the discipline of a college was able to make of the man, whom Warburton most resembled, the great Bentley. Yet all these advantages would have been acquired at an expense ill to be spared and greatly to be regretted. The man might have been polished and the scholar improved, but the phænomenon would have been lost. Mankind might not have learned, for centuries to come, what an untutored mind can do for itself. A selftaught theologian, untamed by rank and unsubdued by intercourse with the great, was yet a novelty; and the manners of a gentleman, the formalities of argument, and the niceties of composition, would, at least with those who love the excentricities of native genius, have been unwillingly accepted in exchange for that glorious extravagance which dazzles while it is unable to convince, that range

of

of erudition which would have been cramped by exactness of research, and that haughty defiance of form and decorum, which, in its rudest transgressions against charity and manners, never failed to combine the powers of a giant with the temper of a ruffian.

In the editor's opinion as to the excellence of Warburton's style, and more especially his controversial style, we are, with one exception, ready to concur. He possessed, in an eminent degree, those two qualities of a great writer, "sapere & fari." I mean superior sense, and the power of doing justice to it by a sound and manly eloquence. It was an ignorant cavil that charged him with want of taste. The objection arose from the originality of his manner; but he wrote, when he thought fit, with the greatest purity and elegance, notwithstanding his strength and energy, which frequently exclude those qualities. The truth seems to be, that Warburton had chosen as his models, the works of our older writers, men congenial with himself in invention, erudition and force, but with respect to style, which as yet was little attended to, undisciplined and irregular. Such were, in their respective departments, Hooker, Chillingworth, and Hyde. It was to minds far inferior to these in energy and comprehension, that the English language owed its last polish in the beginning of the following century; and it is to the overbearing influence of one or two recent examples, inferior to none of the former, that it has relapsed into a state of learned barbarism, which we would willingly hope, in the hands of pedants and coxcombs, is beginning to administer its own antidote. For the rest,' says the right reverend editor,' the higher excellencies of his style were owing to the strength of his imagination, and a clear conception of his subject, in other words, to his sublime genius. Thus his style was properly his own, and what we call original. Yet he did not disdain to draw what assistance he might from the best critics, among whom Quintilian was his favourite.'

There is no accounting for the anomalies of taste. Perhaps no writer of antiquity ever more nearly resembled the best moderns in good sense and sound judgment than this great rhetorician; but it is certain that no one ever paced more awkwardly in the trammels of his own art. His power of expression never seems to keep pace with the vigour of his conceptions; his style is harsh, cramped, and lagging; the offspring of his brain is strong, but the parturition laborious. We greatly doubt, indeed, whether the power of expression is ever improved by rules of artificial rhetoric, as that of reasoning unquestionably is by the cultivation of a pure and unsophisticated logic but of this we are very certain, that whatever may have determined Warburton to the cultivation of scientific rhetoric, or to a preference of Quintilian above the better models of Greece, he was, as far as can be discovered, neither the better nor the

worse

worse for his acquaintance with the Roman teacher: the native fertility of his mind wanted to be enriched with no topics of invention, the clearness of his understanding supplied him with a spontaneous arrangement, and his command and copiousness of language mocked the cold and pedantic institutes of artificial expression. In short, what was said by the best judge of antiquity concerning Anthony as a speaker, may not unaptly be applied to Warburton as

a writer.

Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem, eaque súo quæque loco, ubi plurimum proficere et valere possent-ut ab imperatore, equites, pedites, levis armatura; sic ab illo in maximè opportunis orationis partibus collocabantur. Erat memoria summa, nulla meditationis suspicio.— Verba ipsa, non illa quidem elegantissimo sermone; itaque diligenter loquendi laude caruit; neque tamen est inquinatè locutus; sed illa quæ propria oratoris laus est in verbis. Sed tamen Antonius in verbis & eligendis (neque id ipsum tam leporis causâ quàm ponderis) & collocandis & comprehensione devinciendis nihil non ad rationem dirigebat.'*

The characteristics of his style were freedom, facility and force; he is never oppressed by the weight of his own matter-marching forth to the field in the heavy armour of controversy, he moves with the agility of one who bears but a scrip and a sling: now balancing the ponderous spear of argumentation, and now scattering around him the galling arrows of wit and irony, his dexterity is never impeded by his strength, his strength never impaired by the rapidity of his movements. Words were with Warburton the willing and ever ready ministers of his ideas: he thought not in language only, but in language the most apt and expressive. It was owing to this faculty of native eloquence that he corrected so little; to have retouched his periods would have been to abate their force: under the hands of his editor they might have become more spruce and trim, more adapted to the rule and square of the professed rhetorician, but they would have been less pointedly and characteristically expressive.

For the same reason, whether he had or had not that nice perception of critical beauty usually called taste, the display, or even the exercise of it in his controversial works would have been out of place. Many a luxuriant and careless grace would have been retrenched by the knife of fastidious criticism, many a coarse expressive name, many a rude and severe epithet, which we owe as much to the intrepidity of his temper, as to the indifference of his choice, would have given way to feeble circumlocution and ill concealed malignity.

'Fur es', ait Pedio, Pedius quid? Crimina rasis

Librat in Antithetis.'-PER.