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!
Dr. Thomas Balguy was the son of a learned father, at whose rectory of Northallerton he was born; he was appointed Archdeacon of Salisbury in 1759, and afterwards Archdeacon of Winchester. He died at the prebendal house of the latter city in 1795, at the age of 74. His writings are few—chiefly on church government and authority, which brought him into antagonism with Dr. Priestley and others, who objected to the high view he took of its position. With Hurd and Warburton he was always intimate; his sermon on the consecration of the former was one of the sources of adverse attack; the latter notes his death as that of “an old and esteemed friend.”—Ed.
Dr. Brown was patronised and “pitied” by Warburton for years. He used him, but spoke of him disparagingly, as “a helpless creature in the ways of the world.” Nichols speaks of him as an “elegant, ingenious, and unhappy author.” His father was a native of Scotland; his son was born at Rothbury, in Northumberland, educated at Cambridge, made minor canon at Carlisle, but resigned it in disgust, living in obscurity in that city several years, till the Rebellion of 1745, when he acted as a volunteer at the siege of the Castle, and behaved with great intrepidity. His publication of an “Essay on Satire,” on the death of Pope, led to his acquaintance with Warburton, who helped him to the rectory of Horksley, near Colchester; but he quarrelled with his patron, as he afterwards quarrelled with others. He then settled down to the vicarage of St. Nicholas, Newcastle, but not for long, as an educational scheme of the Empress of Russia offered him inducements to leave England; but his health failed him before he could carry out his intentions, irritability succeeded, and his disappointments, real and imaginary, led him to commit suicide in the fifty-first year of his age. He seems to have been a continual trouble to Warburton, who often alludes to his unsettled habits—and schooled him occasionally after his own fashion. Thus he writes in 1777:—“Brown is here; I think rather faster than ordinary, but no wiser. You cannot imagine the tenderness they all have of his tender places, and with how unfeeling a hand I probe them.”—Ed.
Towne is so far “unknown to fame” that his career is unrecorded by our biographers; he was content to work for, and under the guidance of Warburton, as a literary drudge.—Ed.