Note 184 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

Warburton had the most cutting way of designating his adversaries, either by the most vehement abuse or the light petulance that expressed his ineffable contempt. He says to one, “Though your teeth are short, what you want in teeth you have in venom, and know, as all other creatures do, where your strength lies.” He thus announces in one of the prefaces to the “Divine Legation” the name of the author of a work on “A Future State of Rewards and Punishments,” in which were some objections to Warburton’s theory:—“I shall, therefore, but do what indeed would be justly reckoned the cruellest of all things, tell my reader the name of this miserable; which we find to be J. Tillard.” “Mr. Tillard was first condemned (says the author of ‘Confusion Worse Confounded,’) as a ruffian that stabs a man in the dark, because he did not put his name to his book against the ‘Divine Legation;’ and afterwards condemned as lost to shame, both as a man and a writer, because he did put his name to it.” Would not one imagine this person to be one of the lowest of miscreants? He was a man of fortune and literature. Of this person Warburton says in a letter, “This is a man of fortune, and it is well he is so, for I have spoiled his trade as a writer; and as he was very abusive, free-thinking, and anonymous, I have not spared to expose his ignorance and ill faith.” But afterwards, having discovered that he was a particular friend to Dr. Oliver, he makes awkward apologies, and declares he would not have gone so far had he known this! He was often so vehement in his abuse that I find he confessed it himself, for, in preparing a new edition of the “Divine Legation,” he tells Dr. Birch that he has made “several omissions of passages which were thought vain, insolent, and ill-natured.”

It is amusing enough to observe how he designates men as great as himself. When he mentions the learned Hyde, he places him “at the head of a rabble of lying orientalists.” When he alludes to Peters, a very learned and ingenious clergyman, he passes by him as “The Cornish Critic.” A friend of Peters observed that “he had given Warburton ‘a Cornish hug,’ of which he might be sore as long as he lived.” Dr. Taylor, the learned editor of Demosthenes, he selects from “his fellows,” that is, other dunces: a delicacy of expression which offended scholars. He threatens Dr. Stebbing, who had preserved an anonymous character, “to catch this Eel of Controversy, since he hides his head by the tail, the only part that sticks out of the mud, more dirty indeed than slippery, and still more weak than dirty, as passing through a trap where he was forced at every step to leave part of his skin—that is, his system.” Warburton has often true wit. With what provoking contempt he calls Sir Thomas Hanmer always “The Oxford Editor!” and in his attack on Akenside, never fails to nickname him, in derision, “The Poet!” I refer the reader to a postscript of his “Dedication to the Freethinkers,” for a curious specimen of supercilious causticity in his description of Lord Kaimes as a critic, and Akenside as “The Poet!” Of this pair he tells us, in bitter derision, “they are both men of taste.” Hurd imitated his master successfully, by using some qualifying epithet, or giving an adversary some odd nickname, or discreetly dispensing a little mortifying praise. The antagonists he encounters were men sometimes his superiors, and these he calls “sizeable men.” Some are styled “insect blasphemers!” The learned Lardner is reduced to “the laborious Dr. Lardner;” and “Hume’s History” is treated with the discreet praise of being “the most readable history we have.” He carefully hints to Leland that “he had never read his works, nor looked into his translations; but what he has heard of his writings makes him think favourably of him.” Thus he teases the rhetorical professor by mentioning the “elegant translation which, they say, you have made of Demosthenes!” And he understands that he is “a scholar, who, they say, employs himself in works of learning and taste.”

Lowth seems to have discovered this secret art of Warburton; for he says, “You have a set of names always at hand, a kind of infamous list, or black calendar, where every offender is sure to find a niche ready to receive him; nothing so easy as the application, and slight provocation is sufficient.”