Note 151 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;
Reading edition
The correct taste of Lowth with some humour describes the last sentence of the “Enquiry on Prodigies” as “the Musa Pedestris got on horseback in a high prancing style.” He printed it in measured lines, without, however, changing the place of a single word, and it produced blank verse. Thus it reads—
“Methinks I see her like the mighty Eagle renewing her immortal youth, and purging her opening sight at the unobstructed beams of our benign meridian Sun,” &c.
Such a glowing metaphor, in the uncouth prose of Warburton, startled Lowth’s classical ear. It was indeed “the Musa Pedestris who had got on horseback in a high prancing style;” for as it has since been pointed out, it is a well-known passage towards the close of the Areopagitica of Milton, whose prose is so often purely poetical. See Birch’s Edition of Milton’s Prose Works, I. 158. Warburton was familiarly conversant with our great vernacular writers at a time when their names generally were better known than their works, and when it was considered safe to pillage their most glorious passages. Warburton has been convicted of snatching their purple patches, and sewing them into his coarser web, without any acknowledgment; he did this in the present remarkable instance, and at a later day, in the preface to his “Julian,” he laid violent hands on one of Raleigh’s splendid metaphors.