Note 156 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;
Reading edition
Such opposite studies shot themselves into the most fantastical forms in his rocket-writings, whether they streamed in “The Divine Legation,” or sparkled in “The Origin of Romances,” or played about in giving double senses to Virgil, Pope, and Shakspeare. Churchill, with a good deal of ill-nature and some truth, describes them:—
“A curate first, he read and read, And laid in, while he should have fed The souls of his neglected flock, Of rending, 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; And which, like ill-digested food, To humours turn’d, and not to blood.”
The opinion of Bentley, when he saw “The Divine Legation,” was a sensible one. “This man,” said he, “has a monstrous appetite, with a very bad digestion.”
The Warburtonians seemed to consider his great work, as the Bible by which all literary men were to be sworn. Lowth ridicules their credulity. “‘The Divine Legation,’ it seems, contains in it all knowledge, divine and human, ancient and modern: it is a perfect Encyclopædia, including all history, criticism, divinity, law, politics, from the law of Moses down to the Jew bill, and from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern Rebus-writing, &c.”
“In the 2014 pages of the unfinished ‘Divine Legation,’” observes the sarcastic Gibbon, “four hundred authors are quoted, from St. Austin down to Scarron and Rabelais!”
Yet, after all that satire and wit have denounced, listen to an enlightened votary of Warburton. He asserts that “The ‘Divine Legation’ has taken its place at the head, not to say of English theology, but almost of English literature. To the composition of this prodigious performance, Hooker and Stillingfleet could have contributed the erudition, Chillingworth and Locke the acuteness, Taylor an imagination even more wild and copious, Swift, and perhaps, Eachard, the sarcastic vein of wit; but what power of understanding, except Warburton’s, could first have amassed all these materials, and then compacted them into a bulky and elaborate work, so consistent and harmonious.”—Quarterly Review. vol. vii.