Note 185 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

Sometimes Warburton left his battles to be fought by subaltern genius; a circumstance to which Lowth, with keen pleasantry, thus alludes:—“Indeed, my lord, I was afterwards much surprised, when, having been with great civility dismissed from your presence, I found your footman at your door, armed with his master’s cane, and falling upon me without mercy, yourself looking on and approving, and having probably put the weapon with proper orders into his hands. You think, it seems, that I ought to have taken my beating quietly and patiently, in respect to the livery which he wore. I was not of so tame a disposition: I wrested the weapon from him, and broke it. Your lordship, it seems, by an oblique blow, got an unlucky rap on the knuckles; though you may thank yourself for it, you lay the blame on me.”—Lowth’s Letter to W., p. 11.

Warburton and Hurd frequently concerted together on the manner of attack and defence. In one of these letters of Hurd’s it is very amusing to read—“Taylor is a more creditable dunce than Webster. What do you think to do with the Appendix against Tillard and Sykes? Why might not Taylor rank with them,” &c. The Warburtonians had also a system of espionage. When Dr. Taylor was accused by one of them of having said that Warburton was no scholar, the learned Grecian replied that he did not recollect ever saying that Dr. Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always thought so. Hence a tremendous quarrel! Hurd, the Mercury of our Jupiter, cast the first light shaft against the doctor, then Chancellor of Lincoln, by alluding to the Preface of his work on Civil Law as “a certain thing prefatory to a learned work, intituled ‘The Elements of Civil Law:’” but at length Jove himself rolled his thunder on the hapless chancellor. The doctor had said in his work, that “the Roman emperors persecuted the first Christians, not so much from a dislike of their tenets as from a jealousy of their nocturnal assemblies.” Warburton’s doctrine was, that “they held nocturnal assemblies because of the persecution of their enemies.” One was the fact, and the other the consequence. But the Chancellor of Lincoln was to be outrageously degraded among the dunces! that was the real motive; the “nocturnal assemblies” only the ostensible one. A pamphleteer, in defence of the chancellor, in reply, thought that in “this literary persecution” it might be dangerous “if Dr. Taylor should be provoked to prove in print what he only dropped in conversation.” How innocent was this gentleman of the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars! The proof would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his sarcastic pleasantry; and this object was secured by Warburton’s forty pages of preface, in which the chancellor stands to be buffeted like an ancient quintain, “a mere lifeless block.” All this came upon him for only thinking that Warburton was no scholar!