His conduct to Dr. Grey, the editor of Hudibras, cannot be accounted for by any known fact. I have already noticed their quarrels in the “Calamities of Authors.” Warburton cheerfully supplied Grey with various notes on Hudibras, though he said he had thought of an edition himself, and they were gratefully acknowledged in Grey’s Preface; but behold! shortly afterwards they are saluted by Warburton as “an execrable heap of nonsense;” further, he insulted Dr. Grey for the number of his publications! Poor Dr. Grey and his “Coadjutors,” as Warburton sneeringly called others of his friends, resented this by “A Free and Familiar Letter to that Great Preserver of Pope and Shakspeare, the Rev. Mr. William Warburton.” The doctor insisted that Warburton had had sufficient share in those very notes to be considered as one of the “Coadjutors.” “I may venture to say, that whoever was the fool of the company before he entered (or the fool of the piece, in his own diction) he was certainly so after he engaged in that work; for, as Ben Jonson observes, ‘he that thinks himself the Master-Wit is commonly the Master-Fool.’”
Warburton certainly used little intrigues: he trafficked with the obscure Reviews of the times. He was a correspondent in “The Works of the Learned,” where the account of his first volume of the Divine Legation, he says, is “a nonsensical piece of stuff;” and when Dr. Doddridge offered to draw up an article for his second, the favour was accepted, and it was sent to the miserable journal, though acknowledged “to be too good for it.” In the same journal were published all his specimens of Shakspeare, some years after they had appeared in the “General Dictionary,” with a high character of these wonderful discoveries.—“The Alliance,” when first published, was announced in “The Present State of the Republic of Letters,” to be the work of a gentleman whose capacity, judgment, and learning deserve some eminent dignity in the Church of England, of which he is “now an inferior minister.”—One may presume to guess at “the gentleman,” a little impatient for promotion, who so much cared whether Warburton was only “now an inferior minister.”
These are little arts. Another was, that Warburton sometimes acted Falstaff’s part, and ran his sword through the dead! In more instances than one this occurred. Sir Thomas Hanmer was dead when Warburton, then a bishop, ventured to assert that Sir Thomas’s letter concerning their intercourse about Shakspeare was “one continued falsehood from beginning to end.” The honour and veracity of Hanmer must prevail over the “liveliness” of Warburton, for Hurd lauds his “lively preface to his Shakspeare.” But the “Biographia Britannica” bears marks of Warburton’s violence, in a cancelled sheet. See the Index, art. Hanmer; [where we are told “the sheet being castrated at the instance of Mr., now Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, it has been reprinted as an appendix to the work,” it consisted in the suppression of one of Hanmer’s letters.] He did not choose to attack Dr. Middleton in form, during his lifetime, but reserved his blow when his antagonist was no more. I find in Cole’s MSS. this curious passage:—“It was thought, at Cambridge, that Dr. Middleton and Dr. Warburton did not cordially esteem one another; yet both being keen and thorough sportsmen, they were mutually afraid to engage to each other, for fear of a fall. If that was the case, the bishop judged prudently, however fairly it may be looked upon, to stay till it was out of the power of his adversary to make any reply, before he gave his answer.” Warburton only replied to Middleton’s “Letter from Rome,” in his fourth edition of the “Divine Legation,” 1765.—When Dyson firmly defended his friend Akenside from the rude attacks of Warburton, it is observed, that he bore them with “prudent patience:” he never replied!
These critical extravaganzas are scarcely to be paralleled by “Bentley’s Notes on Milton.” How Warburton turned “an allegorical mermaid” into “the Queen of Scots;”—showed how Shakspeare, in one word, and with one epithet “the majestic world,” described the Orbis Romanus, alluded to the Olympic Games, &c.; yet, after all this discovery, seems rather to allude to a story about Alexander, which Warburton happened to recollect at that moment;—and how he illustrated Octavia’s idea of the fatal consequences of a civil war between Cæsar and Antony, who said it would “cleave the world,” by the story of Curtius leaping into the chasm;—how he rejected “allowed, with absolute power,” as not English, and read “hallowed,” on the authority of the Roman Tribuneship being called Sacro-sancta Potestas; how his emendations often rose from puns; as for instance, when, in Romeo and Juliet, it is said of the Friar, that “the city is much obliged to him,” our new critic consents to the sound of the word, but not to the spelling, and reads hymn; that is, to laud, to praise! These, and more extraordinary instances of perverting ingenuity and abused erudition, would form an uncommon specimen of criticism, which may be justly ridiculed, but which none, except an exuberant genius, could have produced. The most amusing work possible would be a real Warburton’s Shakspeare, which would contain not a single thought, and scarcely an expression, of Shakspeare’s!
Had Johnson known as much as we do of Warburton’s opinion of his critical powers, it would have gone far to have cured his amiable prejudice in favour of Warburton, who really was a critic without taste, and who considered literature as some do politics, merely as a party business. I shall give a remarkable instance. When Johnson published his first critical attempt on Macbeth, he commended the critical talents of Warburton; and Warburton returned the compliment in the preface to his Shakspeare, and distinguishes Johnson as “a man of parts and genius.” But, unluckily, Johnson afterwards published his own edition; and, in his editorial capacity, his public duty prevailed over his personal feelings: all this went against Warburton; and the opinions he now formed of Johnson were suddenly those of insolent contempt. In a letter to Hurd, he writes: “Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think alike!” And to another friend: “The remarks he makes, in every page, on my Commentaries, are full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in them as much folly as malignity, I should have reason to be offended with.” He consoles himself, however, that Johnson’s notes, accompanying his own, will enable even “the trifling part of the public” not to mistake in the comparison.—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 595.
And what became of Johnson’s noble Preface to Shakspeare? Not a word on that!—Warburton, who himself had written so many spirited ones, perhaps did not like to read one finer than his own,—so he passed it by! He travelled through Egypt, but held his hands before his eyes at a pyramid!