Note 162 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

Warburton lost himself in the labyrinth he had so ingeniously constructed. This work harassed his days and exhausted his intellect. Observe the tortures of a mind, even of so great a mind as that of Warburton’s, when it sacrifices all to the perishable vanity of sudden celebrity. Often he flew from his task in utter exhaustion and despair. He had quitted the smooth and even line of truth, to wind about and split himself on all the crookedness of paradoxes. He paints his feelings in a letter to Birch. He says—“I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month and year to year.” He had recourse to “an expedient;” which was, “to set the press on work, and so oblige himself to supply copy.” Such is the confession of the author of the “Divine Legation!” this “encyclopædia” of all ancient and modern lore—all to proceed from “a simple argument!” But when he describes his sufferings, hard is the heart of that literary man who cannot sympathise with such a giant caught in the toils! I give his words:—“Distractions of various kinds, inseparable from human life, joined with a naturally melancholy habit, contribute greatly to increase my indolence. This makes my reading wild and desultory; and I seek refuge from the uneasiness of thought, from any book, let it be what it will. By my manner of writing upon subjects, you would naturally imagine they afford me pleasure, and attach me thoroughly. I will assure you, No!”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 562.

Warburton had not the cares of a family—they were merely literary ones. The secret cause of his “melancholy,” and his “indolence,” and that “want of attachment and pleasure to his subjects;” which his friends “naturally imagined” afforded him so much, was the controversies he had kindled, and the polemical battles he had raised about him. However boldly he attacked in return, his heart often sickened in privacy; for how often must he have beheld his noble and his whimsical edifices built on sands, which the waters were perpetually eating into!

At the last interview of Warburton with Pope, the dying poet exhorted him to proceed with “The Divine Legation.” “Your reputation,” said he, “as well as your duty, is concerned in it. People say you can get no farther in your proof. Nay, Lord Bolingbroke himself bids me expect no such thing.” This anecdote is rather extraordinary; for it appears in “Owen Ruffhead’s Life of Pope,” p. 497, a work written under the eye of Warburton himself; and in which I think I could point out some strong touches from his own hand on certain important occasions, when he would not trust to the creeping dulness of Ruffhead.