Churchill has not passed by unnoticed Warburton’s humility, even to weakness, combined with pride which could rise to haughtiness.
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“He was so proud, that should he meet The twelve apostles in the street, He’d turn his nose up at them all, And shove his Saviour from the wall.” |
Yet this man
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——“Fawned through all his life For patrons first, then for a wife; Wrote Dedications, which must make The heart of every Christian quake.” The Duellist. |
It is certain that the proud and supercilious Warburton long crouched and fawned. Mallet, at least, well knew all that passed between Warburton and Pope. In the “Familiar Epistle” he asserts that Warburton was introduced to Pope by his “nauseous flattery.” A remarkable instance, besides the dedications we have noticed, occurred in his correspondence with Sir Thomas Hanmer. He did not venture to attack “The Oxford Editor,” as he sarcastically distinguishes him, without first demanding back his letters, which were immediately returned, from Sir Thomas’s high sense of honour. Warburton might otherwise have been shown strangely to contradict himself, for in these letters he had been most lavish of his flatteries and encomiums on the man whom he covered with ridicule in the preface to his Shakspeare. See “An Answer to certain Passages in Mr. W.’s Preface to Shakspeare,” 1748.
His dedication to the plain unlettered Ralph Allen of Bath, his greatest of patrons, of his “Commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man,” is written in the same spirit as those to Sir Robert Sutton; but the former unlucky gentleman was more publicly exposed by it. The subject of this dedication turns on “the growth and progress of Fate, divided into four principal branches!” There is an episode about Free-will and Nature and Grace, and “a contrivance of Leibnitz about Fatalism.” Ralph Allen was a good Quaker-like man, but he must have lost his temper if he ever read the dedication! Let us not, however, imagine that Warburton was at all insensible to this violation of literary decorum; he only sacrificed propriety to what he considered a more urgent principle—his own personal interest. No one had a juster conception of the true nature of dedications; for he says in the famous one “to the Free-thinkers:”—“I could never approve the custom of dedicating books to men whose professions made them strangers to the subject. A Discourse on the Ten Predicaments to a Leader of Armies, or a System of Casuistry to a Minister of State, always appeared to me a high absurdity.”
All human characters are mixed—true! yet still we feel indignant to discover some of the greatest often combining the most opposite qualities; and then they are not so much mixed as the parts are naturally joined together. Could one imagine that so lofty a character as Warburton could have been liable to have incurred even the random stroke of the satirist? whether true or false, the events of his life, better known at this day than in his own, will show. Churchill says that
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“He could cringe and creep, be civil, And hold a stirrup to the devil, If, in a journey to his mind, He’d let him mount, and ride behind.” |
The author of the “Canons of Criticism,” with all his sprightly sarcasm, gives a history of Warburton’s later Dedications. “The first edition of ‘The Alliance’ came out without a dedication, but was presented to the bishops; and when nothing came of that, the second was addressed to both the Universities; and when nothing came of that, the third was dedicated to a noble Earl, and nothing has yet come of that.” Appendix to “Canons of Criticism,” seventh edit. 261.