It is probable I may have drawn my meteor from our volcanic author himself, who had his lucid moments, even in the deliriums of his imagination. Warburton has rightly observed, in his “Divine Legation,” p. 203, that “Systems, Schemes, and Hypotheses, all bred of heat, in the warm regions of Controversy, like meteors in a troubled sky, have each its turn to blaze and fly away.”
It seems, even by the confession of a Warburtonian, that his master was of “a human size;” for when Bishop Lowth rallies the Warburtonians for their subserviency and credulity to their master, he aimed a gentle stroke at Dr. Brown, who, in his “Essays on the Characteristics,” had poured forth the most vehement panegyric. In his “Estimate of Manners of the Times,” too, after a long tirade of their badness in regard to taste and learning, he thus again eulogizes his mighty master:—“Himself is abused, and his friends insulted for his sake, by those who never read his writings; or, if they did, could neither taste nor comprehend them; while every little aspiring or despairing scribbler eyes him as Cassius did Cæsar: and whispers to his fellow—
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‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves.’ |
No wonder, then, if the malice of the Lilliputian tribe be bent against this dreaded Gulliver; if they attack him with poisoned arrows, whom they cannot subdue by strength.”
On this Lowth observes, that “this Lord Paramount in his pretensions doth bestride the narrow world of literature, and has cast out his shoe over all the regions of science.” This leads to a ludicrous comparison of Warburton, with King Pichrochole and his three ministers, who, in Urquhart’s admirable version of the French wit, are Count Merdaille, the Duke of Smalltrash, and the Earl Swashbuckler, who set up for universal monarchy, and made an imaginary expedition through all the quarters of the world, as Rabelais records, and the bishop facetiously quotes. Dr. Brown afterwards seemed to repent his panegyric, and contrives to make his gigantic hero shrink into a moderate size. “I believe still, every little aspiring fellow continues thus to eye him. For myself, I have ever considered him as a man, yet considerable among his species, as the following part of the paragraph clearly demonstrates. I speak of him here as a Gulliver indeed; yet still of no more than human size, and only apprehended to be of colossal magnitude by certain of his Lilliputian enemies.” Thus subtilely would poor Dr. Brown save appearances! It must be confessed that, in a dilemma, never was a giant got rid of so easily!—The plain truth, however, was, that Brown was then on the point of quarrelling with Warburton; for he laments, in a letter to a friend, that “he had not avoided all personal panegyric. I had thus saved myself the trouble of setting right a character which I far over-painted.” A part of this letter is quoted in the “Biographia Britannica.”
“Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the collections of their respective works,” itself a collection which our shelves could ill spare, though maliciously republished by Dr. Parr. The dedication by Parr stands unparalleled for comparative criticism. It is the eruption of a volcano; it sparkles, it blazes, and scatters light and destruction. How deeply ought we to regret that this Nazarite suffered his strength to be shorn by the Delilahs of spurious fame. Never did this man, with his gifted strength, grasp the pillars of a temple, to shake its atoms over Philistines; but pleased the childlike simplicity of his mind by pulling down houses over the heads of their unlucky inhabitants. He consumed, in local and personal literary quarrels, a genius which might have made the next age his own. With all the stores of erudition, and all the eloquence of genius, he mortified a country parson for his politics, and a London accoucheur for certain obstetrical labours performed on Horace; and now his collected writings lie before us, volumes unsaleable and unread. His insatiate vanity was so little delicate, as often to snatch its sweetmeat from a foul plate; it now appears, by the secret revelations in Griffith’s own copy of his “Monthly Review,” that the writer of a very elaborate article on the works of Dr. Parr, was no less a personage than the Doctor himself. His egotism was so declamatory, that it unnaturalized a great mind, by the distortions of Johnsonian mimicry; his fierceness, which was pushed on to brutality on the unresisting, retreated with a child’s terrors when resisted; and the pomp of petty pride in table triumphs and evening circles, ill compensated for the lost century he might have made his own!
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Lord o’er the greatest, to the least a slave, Half-weak, half-strong, half-timid, and half-brave; To take a compliment of too much pride, And yet most hurt when praises are denied. Thou art so deep discerning, yet so blind, So learn’d, so ignorant, cruel, yet so kind; So good, so bad, so foolish, and so wise;— By turns I love thee, and by turns despise. MS. Anon. (said to be by the late Dr. Homer.) |