it would appear, among other reasons, for the purpose of ascertaining what had been written on a subject; not that he might adopt or reject, at his discretion, the opinions of others, but that he might be sure of producing what had never been said or thought before. He was like an adventurer projecting a voyage of discovery, who should sit down to study the charts and journals of all his predecessors, neither for direction nor security, but that having been instructed in every route already explored by man, he might penetrate into the unfathomed depths of unknown seas, and ransack the wealth of countries hitherto without a name. Such a spirit, aided by a constitution however strong, and a hand however skilful, while it might occasionally reward the discoverer, and enrich his country with unexpected wealth, would sometimes drive him upon unknown rocks, and sometimes entangle him in inextricable quicksands, where his rashness would at once be regarded as his calamity and his reproach. Such was his ill-starred dissertation on the book of Job, which, besides having incidentally drawn upon him the vengeance of Lowth, missed that praise which Warburton courted more ardently than either utility or truth, that of fortunate boldness, or ingenious and well-supported error. His disgraceful failure on this subject was, however, more than compensated by his wonderful dissertation on hieroglyphical and picture-writing; one of those felicities which seem to be occasionally and extrinsically bestowed upon great genius, and are beyond all power of ordinary effort and meditation. In profundity of research, clearness of deduction, and happiness of illustration, we know of no analysis which will bear a comparison with it. Had Warburton written nothing but the fourth section of the fourth book of the Divine Legation,' it would have rendered his name immortal."

The Divine Legation' was received with little favour in either university, and was bitterly assailed by a host of antagonists. Our author defended himself with great spirit, and published a second volume in 1741. In 1746, he was chosen preacher of Lincoln's inn through the interest of his friend Murray. In 1750, he published Julian, or a Discourse concerning the earthquake and fiery eruption which defeated that emperor's attempt to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.' This is an able, erudite, and convincing dissertation on the celebrated passage in Ammianus Marcellinus, wherein that historian records the miraculous manner in which the emperor Julian's attempts to rebuild the Temple were defeated. The following rules for the qualification of an unexceptionable witness, affording a favourable specimen of Warburton's style, are taken from this piece: "Were infidelity itself, when it would evade the force of testimony, to prescribe what qualities it expected in a faultless testimony, it could invent none but what might be found in the historian here produced. He was a pagan, and so not prejudiced in favour of Christianity: he was a dependent, follower, and profound admirer of Julian, and so not inclined to report any thing to his dishonour. He was a lover of truth, and so would not relate what he knew or but suspected to be false. He had great sense, improved by the study of philosophy, and so would not suffer himself to be deceived:

1 Richard Bentley is said to have observed of its author, after reading the first part of the work, "This man has a monstrous appetite, but a very bad digestion!" This work was highly esteemed by the president Montesquieu.

PERIOD.]

BISHOP WARBURTON.

13

he was not only contemporary to the fact, but at the time it happened, resident near the place. He related it not as an uncertain hearsay, with diffidence, but as a notorious fact; at that time no more questioned in Asia than the project of the Persian expedition: he inserted it not for any partial purpose in support or confutation of any system, in defence or discredit of any character; he delivered it in no cursory or transient manner, nor in a loose or private memoir, but gravely and deliberately as the natural and necessary part of a composition the most useful and important, a general history of the empire, on the complete performance of which the author was so intent, that he exchanged a court life for one of study and contemplation, and chose Rome, the great repository of the proper materials, for the place of his retirement." Warburton's next labour was the editing of a uniform edition of his deceased friend and benefactor Pope's works. Warburton had completely gained the confidence of the bard of Twickenham, who is even said to have paid great deference to his criticisms, and to have made numerous alterations on his productions in obedience to his strictures; he introduced the Lincolnshire parson' to all his most influential friends, and at his death bequeathed to him one-half of his library, and the whole of his unsold copyrights.

His first government preferment was a prebend of Gloucester, which was conferred upon him in 1753, through the patronage of Yorke, Lord Hardwicke. Warburton had espoused government measures with much warmth, so early as 1745; its patronage, therefore, came late; and he appears never to have forgotten the coldness with which he was so long In a letter to his friend and future biographer, Hurd, written treated. in February, 1766, he says: "I brought, as usual, a bad cold with me to town; and this being the first day I ventured out of doors, it was employed, as in duty bound, at court, it being a levee-day. A buffoon lord in waiting was very busy marshalling the circle; and he said to me, without ceremony,- Move forward; you clog up the door-way.' This brought the I replied with as little, Did nobody clog up the king's door-stead more than I, there would be room for all honest men.'

man to himself. When the king came up to me, he asked, 'Why I did not come to town before?' I said, I understood there was no business going forward in the house in which I could be of service to his majesty.' He replied, He supposed the severe storm of snow would have brought me up.' I answered, I was under cover of a warm house.' You see by all this how unfit I am for courts."

In 1755 he was appointed a prebendary of Durham, and in the same year had the degree of D.D. conferred upon him by archiepiscopal mandate. In 1757 he was made dean of Bristol; and, in 1759, was adHis publications up to this latvanced to the bishopric of Gloucester. ter date, besides those already mentioned, were a vindication of Pope from the charge of Spinosism in his Essay on Man,'-a Dissertation on the origin of books of Chivalry,—an edition of Shakspeare with notes, -some strictures on Middleton, animadversions on Bolingbroke's philosophical writings, and an improved edition of the first volume of the Divine Legation.'

In 1762 he published his Doctrine of Grace.' This work was directed against the opinions of Middleton on the one hand, and John Wesley on the other. It is an exceedingly scurrilous performance. In

1766 he founded a course of lectures at Lincoln's inn, "to prove the truth of revealed religion in general, and of the Christian in particular, from the completion of the prophecies in the Old and New Testament." His death took place on the 7th of June, 1779.

Johnson-than whom no man was better fitted to have been the biographer of Warburton-has given us the following estimate of the bishop's intellectual character: "He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervent and vehement, supplied by incessant and unlimited inquiry with wonderful extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor clouded his perspicacity. To every work he brought a memory fully fraught, together with a fancy fertile of original combinations; and at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and the wit. But his knowledge was too multifarious to be always exact, and his pursuits were too eager to be always cautious. His abilities gave him a haughty confidence which he disdained to conceal or mollify; and his impatience of opposition disposed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous superiority, as made his readers commonly his enemies, and excited against the advocate, the wishes of some who favoured the cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman emperor's determination, Oderint dum metuant.' He used no allurements of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than to persuade. His style is copious without selection, and forcible without neatness; he took the words that presented themselves; his diction is coarse and impure; and his sentences are unmeasured."

The Quarterly reviewer has supplied us with a fuller sketch of the bishop, from which the following is an extract: "His whole constitution, bodily as well as mental, seemed to indicate that he was born to be an extraordinary man; with a large and athletic person he prevented the necessity of such bodily exercises as strong constitutions usually require, by rigid and undeviating abstinence. The time thus saved was uniformly devoted to study, of which no measure or continuance ever exhausted his understanding or checked the natural and lively flow of his spirits. A change in the object of his pursuit was his only relaxation; and he could pass and repass from fathers and philosophers to Don Quixote, in the original, with perfect ease and pleasure. In the mind of Warburton, the foundation of classical literature had been well laid, yet not so as to enable him to pursue the science of ancient criticism with an exactness equal to the extent in which he grasped it. His master-faculty was reason, and his master-science was theology; the very outline of which last, as marked out by this great man, for the direction of young students, surpasses the attainments of many who have the reputation of considerable divines. One deficiency of his education he had carefully corrected by cultivating logic with great diligence. That he has sometimes mistaken the sense of his own citations in Greek, may perhaps be imputed to a purpose of bending them to his own opinions. After all, he was incomparably the worst critic in his mothertongue. Little acquainted with old English literature, and as little with those provincial dialects which yet retain much of the phraseology of Shakspeare, he has exposed himself to the derision of far inferior judges by mistaking the sense of passages, in which he would have been corrected by shepherds and ploughmen. His sense of humour, like that of most men of very vigorous faculties, was strong, but extremely

coarse, while the rudeness and vulgarity of his manners as a controvertist removed all restraints of decency or decorum in scattering his jests about him. His taste seems to have been neither just nor delicate. He had nothing of that intuitive perception of beauty which feels rather than judges, and yet is sure to be followed by the common suffrage of mankind; on the contrary, his critical favours were commonly bestowed according to rules and reasons, and for the most part according to some perverse and capricious reasons of his own. In short, it may be adduced as one of those compensations with which Providence is ever observed to balance the excesses and superfluities of its own gifts, that there was not a faculty about this wonderful man which does not appear to have been distorted by a certain inexplicable perverseness, in which pride and love of paradox were blended with the spirit of subtle and sophistical reasoning. In the lighter exercises of his faculties it may not unfrequently be doubted whether he believed himself; in the more serious, however fine-spun his theories may have been, he was unquestionably honest. On the whole, we think it a fair subject of speculation, whether it were desirable that Warburton's education and early habits should have been those of other great scholars. That the ordinary forms of scholastic institution would have been for his own benefit, and in some respects for that of mankind, there can be no doubt. The gradations of a university would, in part, have mortified his vanity and subdued his arrogance. The perpetual collisions of kindred and approximating minds which constitute, perhaps, the great excellence of those illustrious seminaries, would have rounded off some portion of his native asperities; he would have been broken by the academical curb to pace in the trammels of ordinary ratiocination; he would have thought alway above, yet not altogether unlike, the rest of mankind. In short, he would have become precisely what the discipline of a college was able to make of the man, whom Warburton most resembled, the great Bentley. Yet all these advantages would have been acquired at an expense ill to be spared and greatly to be regretted. The man might have been polished and the scholar improved, but the phenomenon would have been lost. Mankind might not have learned, for centuries to come, what an untutored mind can do for itself. A self-taught theologian, untamed by rank and unsubdued by intercourse with the great, was yet a novelty; and the manners of a gentleman, the formalities of argument, and the niceties of composition, would, at least with those who love the eccentricities of native genius, have been unwillingly accepted in exchange for that glorious extravagance which dazzles while it is unable to convince, that range of erudition which would have been cramped by exactness of research, and that haughty defiance of form and decorum, which in its rudest transgressions against charity and manners, never failed to combine the powers of a giant with the temper of a ruffian."

Bishop Newton.

BORN A. D. 1704.-DIED A. D. 1782.

THIS prelate was born at Lichfield, and educated at the grammarschool of that place, and at Westminster school. He took his degree

of M.A. at Cambridge, in 1730, after which he became assistant to Dr Trebeck of St George's church, Hanover-square, London. In 1738, Dr Pearce, afterwards bishop of Rochester, appointed him morningpreacher at Spring-garden. In 1744, he was presented by the earl of Bath to the rectory of St Mary Le Bow, Cheapside. Newton distinguished himself during the commotions of 1745 by his activity in denouncing the sin and crime of rebellion.

In 1749, he published an edition of the 'Paradise Lost,' which was very favourably received, and was one of the first specimens of an English classic cum notis variorum.' It is very respectably got up, and contains an elaborate verbal index by the indefatigable Alexander Cruden. Some time after he published Paradise Regained,' on the same plan.

In 1754, he published the first volume of his well-known Dissertations on the Prophecies; the second and third volumes appeared in 1758. Pearce, Warburton, and Jortin, are said to have looked over the manuscript of the dissertations, and aided the author with their remarks.

In 1756, he was appointed one of the king's chaplains, and next year received a prebend in Westminster. Soon after this, he married his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Lisburne; and in the same month was promoted to the bishopric of Bristol, and the residentiaryship of St Paul's.

Bishop Newton died in 1782. His collected works were published in the same year, in three volumes 4to. He was a man of piety and erudition; but of no very powerful intellect. Prophecies' is still a popular work.

Job Orton.

His 'Dissertations on the

BORN A. D. 1717.-DIED A. D. 1783.

He

THIS eminent dissenting divine was a native of Shrewsbury. was educated at the free-school in that town, and afterwards spent a year at Warrington, under the charge of Dr Charles Owen, a dissenting minister.

In August, 1734, he entered Dr Doddridge's academy at Northampton; and in 1738 was chosen assistant in that institution. In 1741 he accepted a call to the pastoral office in his native town, where he continued to labour with great acceptableness and usefulness until the year 1765, when his increasing bodily infirmities compelled him to resign his charge. We shall relate the remaining incidents of his life nearly in the words of Dr Kippis.

Mr Orton's quitting his pastoral connection with the dissenters at Shrewsbury was attended with unhappy consequences. A contest arose with respect to the choice of an assistant to Mr Fownes which at length ended in a separation. The larger number of the society thought it their duty to provide themselves with another place of worship; and with these Mr Orton concurred in opinion. He esteemed himself, says his biographer, bound to countenance them upon every principle of conscience, as a Christian, a dissenter, a minister, and a friend to liberty.