The Attic irony was translated into plain English, in “Remarks on Dr. Warburton’s Account of the Sentiments of the Early Jews,” 1757; and the following rules for all who dissented from Warburton are deduced:—“You must not write on the same subject that he does. You must not glance at his arguments, even without naming him or so much as referring to him. If you find his reasonings ever so faulty, you must not presume to furnish him with better of your own, even though you prove, and are desirous to support his conclusions. When you design him a compliment, you must express it in full form, and with all the circumstance of panegyrical approbation, without impertinently qualifying your civilities by assigning a reason why you think he deserves them, as this might possibly be taken for a hint that you know something of the matter he is writing about as well as himself. You must never call any of his discoveries by the name of conjectures, though you allow them their full proportion of elegance, learning, &c.; for you ought to know that this capital genius never proposed anything to the judgment of the public (though ever so new and uncommon) with diffidence in his life. Thus stands the decree prescribing our demeanour towards this sovereign in the Republic of Letters, as we find it promulged, and bearing date at the palace of Lincoln’s Inn, Nov. 25, 1755.”—From whence Hurd’s “Seventh Dissertation” was dated.
Gibbon’s “Critical Observations on the Design of the Sixth Book of the Æneid.” Dr. Parr considers this clear, elegant, and decisive work of criticism, as a complete refutation of Warburton’s discovery.
It is curious enough to observe that Warburton himself, acknowledging this to be a paradox, exultingly exclaims, “Which, like so many others I have had the ODD FORTUNE to advance, will be seen to be only another name for Truth.” This has all the levity of a sophist’s language! Hence we must infer that some of the most important subjects could not be understood and defended, but by Warburton’s “odd fortune!” It was this levity of ideas that raised a suspicion that he was not always sincere. He writes, in a letter, of “living in mere spite, to rub another volume of the ‘Divine Legation’ in the noses of bigots and zealots.” He employs the most ludicrous images, and the coarsest phrases, on the most solemn subjects. In one of his most unlucky paradoxes with Lowth, on the age and style of the writings of Job, he accuses that elegant scholar of deficient discernment; and, in respect to style, as not “distinguishing partridge from horseflesh;” and in quoting some of the poetical passages, of “paying with an old song,” and “giving rhyme for reason.” Alluding to some one of his adversaries, whom he calls “the weakest, as well as the wickedest of all mankind,” he employs a striking image—“I shall hang him and his fellows, as they do vermin in a warren, and leave them to posterity, to stink and blacken in the wind.”
Warburton, in this work (the “Doctrine of Grace,”) has a curious passage, too long to quote, where he observes, that “The Indian and Asiatic eloquence was esteemed hyperbolic and puerile by the more phlegmatic inhabitants of Rome and Athens: and the Western eloquence, in its turn, frigid or insipid, to the hardy and inflamed imaginations of the East. The same expression, which in one place had the utmost simplicity, had in another the utmost sublime.” The jackal, too, echoes the roar of the lion; for the polished Hurd, whose taste was far more decided than Warburton’s, was bold enough to add, in his Letter to Leland, “That which is thought supremely elegant in one country, passes in another for finical; while what in this country is accepted under the idea of sublimity, is derided in that other as no better than bombast.” So unsettled were the no-taste of Warburton, and the prim-taste of Hurd!
The Letter to Leland is characterised in the “Critical Review” for April, 1765, as the work of “a preferment-hunting toad-eater, who, while his patron happened to go out of his depth, tells him that he is treading good ground; but at the same time offers him the use of a cork-jacket to keep him above water.”