Note 186 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

See what I have said at the close of the note, pp. 262-3. In a collection entitled “Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton’s late Edition of Mr. Pope’s Works,” 1751, are numerous epigrams, parodies, and similes on it. I give one:—

“As on the margin of Thames’ silver flood Stand little necessary piles of wood, So Pope’s fair page appears with notes disgraced: Put down the nuisances, ye men of taste!”

Lowth has noticed the use Warburton made of his patent for vending Pope. “I thought you might possibly whip me at the cart’s-tail in a note to the ‘Divine Legation,’ the ordinary place of your literary executions; or pillory me in the Dunciad, another engine which, as legal proprietor, you have very ingeniously and judiciously applied to the same purpose; or, perhaps, have ordered me a kind of Bridewell correction, by one of your beadles, in a pamphlet.”—Lowth’s “Letter to Warburton,” p. 4.

Warburton carried the licentiousness of the pen in all these notes to the Dunciad to a height which can only be paralleled in the gross logomachies of Schioppius, Gronovius, and Scaliger, and the rest of that snarling crew. But his wit exceeded even his grossness. He was accused of not sparing—

“Round-house wit and Wapping choler.” [Verses occasioned by Mr. W.’s late Edition of Pope.]

And one of his most furious assailants thus salutes him:—“Whether you are a wrangling Wapping attorney, a pedantic pretender to criticism, an impudent paradoxical priest, or an animal yet stranger, an heterogeneous medley of all three, as your farraginous style seems to confess.”—An Epistle to the Author of a Libel entitled “A Letter to the Editor of Bolingbroke’s Works,” &c.—See Nichols, vol. v. p. 651.

I have ascertained that Mallet was the author of this furious epistle. He would not acknowledge what he dared not deny. Warburton treated Mallet, in this instance, as he often did his superiors—he never replied! The silence seems to have stung this irascible and evil spirit: he returned again to the charge, with another poisoned weapon. His rage produced “A Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living,” 1749. The style of this second letter has been characterised as “bad enough to disgrace even gaols and garrets.” Its virulence could not well exceed its predecessor. The oddness of its title has made this worthless thing often inquired after. It is merely personal. It is curious to observe Mallet, in this pamphlet, treat Pope as an object of pity, and call him “this poor man.” [David Mallet was the son of an innkeeper, who, by means of the party he wrote for, obtained lucrative appointments under Government, and died rich. He was unscrupulous in his career, and ready as a writer to do the most unworthy things. The death of Admiral Byng was hastened by the unscrupulous denunciations of Mallet, who was pensioned in consequence.] Orator Henley took some pains, on the first appearance of this catching title, to assure his friends that it did not refer to him. The title proved contagious; which shows the abuse of Warburton was very agreeable. Dr. Z. Grey, under the title of “A Country Curate,” published “A Free and Familiar Letter to the Great Refiner of Pope and Shakspeare,” 1750; and in 1753, young Cibber tried also at “A Familiar Epistle to Mr. William Warburton, from Mr. Theophilus Cibber,” prefixed to the “Life of Barton Booth.” Dr. Z. Grey’s “freedom and familiarity” are designed to show Warburton that he has no wit; but unluckily, the doctor having none himself, his arguments against Warburton’s are not decisive. “The familiarity” of Mallet is that of a scoundrel, and the younger Cibber’s that of an idiot: the genius of Warburton was secure. Mallet overcharged his gun with the fellest intentions, but found his piece, in bursting, annihilated himself. The popgun of the little Theophilus could never have been heard!

[Warburton never lost a chance of giving a strong opinion against Mallet; and Dr. Johnson says, “When Mallet undertook to write the ‘Life of Marlborough,’ Warburton remarked that he might perhaps forget that Marlborough was a general, as he had forgotten that Bacon was a philosopher.”]

But Warburton’s rage was only a part of his secret principle; for can anything be more witty than his attack on poor Cooper, the author of “The Life of Socrates?” Having called his book “a late worthless and now forgotten thing, called ‘The Life of Socrates,’” he adds, “where the head of the author has just made a shift to do the office of a camera obscura, and represent things in an inverted order, himself above, and Rollin, Voltaire, and every other author of reputation, below.” When Cooper complained of this, and of some severer language, to Warburton, through a friend, Warburton replied that Cooper had attacked him, and that he had only taken his revenge “with a slight joke.” Cooper was weak and vain enough to print a pamphlet, to prove that this was a serious accusation, and no joke; and if it was a joke, he shows it was not a correct one. In fact, Cooper could never comprehend how his head was like a camera obscura! Cooper was of the Shaftesburian school—philosophers who pride themselves on “the harmony” of their passions, but are too often in discords at a slight disturbance. He equalled the virulence of Warburton, but could not attain to the wit. “I found,” says Cooper, “previous to his pretended witticism about the camera obscura, such miserable spawn of wretched malice, as nothing but the inflamed brain of a rank monk could conceive, or the oyster-selling maids near London Bridge could utter.” One would not suppose all this came from the school of Plato, but rather from the tub of Diogenes. Something must be allowed for poor Cooper, whose “Life of Socrates” had been so positively asserted to be “a late worthless and forgotten thing.” It is curious enough to observe Cooper declaring, after this sally, that Warburton “has very unfortunately used the word impudent (which epithet Warburton had applied to him), as it naturally reminds every reader that the pamphlet published about two years ago, addressed ‘to the most impudent man living,’ was universally acknowledged to be dedicated to our commentator.” Warburton had always the Dunciad in his head when a new quarrel was rising, which produced an odd blunder on the side of Edwards, and provoked that wit to be as dull as Cooper. Warburton said, in one of his notes on Edwards, who had entitled himself “a gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn,”—“This gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, is in reality a gentleman only of the Dunciad, or, to speak him better, in the plain language of our honest ancestors to such mushrooms, a gentleman of the last edition.” Edwards misunderstood the allusion, and sore at the personal attack which followed, of his having “eluded the solicitude of his careful father,” considered himself “degraded of his gentility,” that it was “a reflection on his birth,” and threatened to apply to “Mr. Warburton’s Masters of the Bench, for degrading a ‘barrister of their house.’” This afforded a new triumph to Warburton, in a new note, where he explains his meaning of these “mushrooms,” whom he meant merely as literary ones; and assures “Fungoso and his friends, who are all gentlemen, that he meant no more than that Edwards had become a gentleman of the last edition of the Dunciad!” Edwards and his fungous friends had understood the phrase as applied to new-fangled gentry. One of these wits, in the collection of verses cited above, says to Warburton:—

“This mushroom has made sauce for you. He’s meat; thou’rt poison—plain enough— If he’s a mushroom, thou’rt a puff!”

Warburton had the full command over the Dunciad, even when Pope was alive, for it was in consequence of Warburton’s being refused a degree at Oxford, that the poet, though one had been offered to himself, produced the celebrated lines of “Apollo’s Mayor and Aldermen,” in the fourth Dunciad. Thus it is that the personal likes and dislikes of witty men come down to posterity, and are often mistaken as just satire, when, after all, they are nothing but Literary Quarrels, seldom founded on truth, and very often complete falsehoods!