we shall frequently have occasion to speak; but here we may remark, that if by the term scholar we are to understand a Bentley, a Porson, a Scaliger, or a Hermann, that Warburton was not; and if by the term theologian we are supposed to mean a Jewel, a Hooker, a Taylor, or a Barrow, to that name also Warburton is not entitled. They stamped with their own image and superscription the sacred literature of their respective ages. He had no pretensions to the eloquence either of the pulpit, or of the Apology,' the Ecclesiastical Polity,' or the Liberty of 'Prophesying.' As little can Warburton claim to have been such a shepherd of the flock as Leighton, Ken, or Tillotson. Preaching he disliked, diocesan business was as little to his taste. The one interrupted his studies, the other ruffled his temper. His pen was in fact his crosier; his flock, the learned public. He wrote with his wonted asperity against those who believed too little and those who believed too much-against Papists and Methodists, against Socinians and Deists, but he made no attempt either by pulpit or pastoral arts to win them back to the Anglican fold. So busy a man as he was cannot be said to have indulged in the fat slumbers of the Church; yet the Church does not reckon in Warburton, whether as deacon, priest, or bishop, such a steward or minister as Paul would have approved. As a layman he might have composed any one of his many volumes or of his yet more numerous tracts; as a clergyman, the diocese of Gloucester was poorly furnished indeed if it contained no abler preacher or more active parish priest than its bishop. Indeed, among the regular luminaries of the time, whether scholars or divines, he moved like a comet, in an orbit of his own; and like a comet also, though he perplexed his contemporaries with fear and wonder, he blazed for a season only.

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It is commonly said, apologetically, that the lives of scholars present few incidents for either biographers or readers. This, however, cannot be said of Warburton, and Mr. Watson judiciously opens his narrative without any apology of the kind. Though the writings of Bishop Warburton,' he remarks, produced no permanent effects either on literature or 'theology, yet the variety of subjects of which he treated, the display of intellectual energy in his pages, the number of ' eminent persons with whom he was brought into contact, and 'the scornful defiance with which he answered all that op'posed him, render his life a career that cannot be surveyed 'without interest.'

William Warburton was born at Newark in December 1698. His education has been called desultory, but, so far as

we can discover, it differed little if at all from the education of other lads of the time. For then the great foundation schools were reserved, with few exceptions, for the sons of noble and opulent houses, while the sons of the middle orders went to the nearest grammar-school, where the master might be a sound philologer like Dawes or Johnson of Nottingham, or a dunce like the tutor of Roderick Random. Warburton learned his accidence at a private academy, and to construe his Corderius, his Nepos, and such like branches of learning,' at the grammar-schools of Oakham and Newark. It may be presumed that he endured few or none of the hardships that rendered school life so painful in retrospect to Cowper, and that ultimately prompted him to write his Tirocinium' with much of the spirit and somewhat of the prejudice of Charles Churchill. For Warburton's first schoolmaster was his own brother-in-law, and his third his cousin and namesake. If they spared the boy out of respect for the family blood, it is by no means certain they did not spoil the man. Moderate flagellation might perhaps have taken some of the conceit out of master William. No early omens ushered in the future meteor of the literary firmament. One of his masters described him as the dullest of all dull scholars,' and could scarcely be made to believe that from so thick a skull came forth The Divine 'Legation!' Another said that he loved his book and his play as other boys do.' We could desire in this case to have the evidence of a boy from Oakham or Newark school. We suspect William to have been a bully.

His father was an attorney, and Warburton minor was destined to earn his bread by drawing wills and leases, and by 'hearing, consulting, and advising.' This, his early profession, was not forgotten by the foes he made in later years, but it is uncertain whether he practised the law after his apprenticeship expired. Rumour said that for a while he was a wine-merchant in Southwark, but, as sometimes happens, she was either misinformed or lied. The best-attested fact in his early history is that none of his kin, friends, or acquaintance formed any expectations of him, whether for evil or for good.

To have been bred an attorney and reputed a wine-merchant argues that the Warburtons, in 1698, inscribed their name among neither knights nor esquires; but if a decayed, they were an ancient house. They came into England with the Conqueror. Hudard or Odard may have heard Taillefer intone the Song of Roland to the Norman vanguard at Hastings. Sixth in descent from this Hudard, Sir Peter Dutton settled at Warburton, in Cheshire, and took the name of his abode.

One of the Duttons de Warburton was sheriff of Cheshire, and a knight of Henry VII.'s body-guard; another son of the sheriff's was Judge of the Common Pleas ; a third was created a baronet in 1660. Sir Peter Warburton, the last baronet of the family, died early in the present century. There is no evidence of Warburton's having ever boasted of his family tree, even when most pressed by the hunters; and this is to his credit, for he was not remarkable for humility. The civil wars turned one branch of the Warburtons into attorneys. They were Cavaliers, and paid the usual price for taking the loser's side. The future Bishop was the third of his race entitled to sign himself gentleman' by Act of Parliament.

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Whatever opinions his friends may have entertained of him, Warburton himself was not without premonitions of his own possible career. He may not have aspired to a mitre or even a stall, but he saw in the Church the goal for which he sighedindependence and leisure for a literary life. I know very 'well,' he said to friends taxing him as a dull uninventive companion, what you and others think of me ; but I believe 'I shall one day or other convince the world that I am not so ignorant or so great a fool as I am taken to be.' Ignorant, in comparison with his associates in Newark, Warburton cannot have been even then, since to read and to meditate were his delight from his earliest years. He had begun, as Bishop Hurd learnt from him, while studying the law with Mr. Kirke, 'to manifest an extraordinary love of general reading: he found 'means to enlarge his acquaintance with the authors he had ⚫ commenced at school.' He seems to have given some attention to mathematical and scientific studies, and before his clerkship was ended he had laid the foundation of the vast though irregular structure which he afterwards reared. As soon as his reading took a theological turn, he found an able and zealous assistant in his cousin William, his former master at Newark Grammar School. Of this assistance, which he partly repaid by serving him as under-master, he always spoke with gratitude, and he commemorated the learning and abilities of his kinsman in a long Latin epitaph. Four years after he had abandoned the law he took deacon's orders, but he seems to have been in no hurry to take the next step, since four years more expired before he was ordained priest. Neither the parish nor the cure which he served is known; but he was soon to obtain something far better than a curacy—a patron able and willing to advance him.

Sir Richard Sutton, a Lincolnshire baronet, had wit or luck

enough to be employed as a diplomatist, and had been sent on a mission to Constantinople. His acquaintance with Warburton seems to have begun in the latter's chrysalis stage of attorney's clerk. It was improved by his protégé dedicating to him his first publication, entitled Miscellaneous Translations in Prose and Verse, from Roman Orators and Historians.' The name and virtues of the Suttons were, as the manner then was, duly emblazoned in a dedication that reads and is arranged like an epitaph. Priscian's head is more than once broken in this lapidary composition. Ten years afterwards, indeed, he had acquired considerable command of the Latin language, but he always wrote it in a fashion that would shock a fourth-form boy at Eton, and have made Quintilian stare and gasp.' Of the translations, those in prose were only better than those in verse because those in verse were as bad as they could be. He should be a book-hunter luckier and more keen-scenting than Monkbarn's hero, snuffy Davie' himself, who could now find this volume on a stall. Even the memory of it would have perished utterly, for the author cast it off, had not Dr. Parr, in a fit of spleen against Bishop Hurd, maliciously reprinted it in his quarto of Tracts by a Warburtonian.' The dedication, however, served its purpose; Sir Richard Sutton either did not detect or did not resent the blunders of the Latin or the baldness of the English, and procured for Warburton the small living of Greasely, in Nottinghamshire, which, we conjecture for the use of studious youth' in orders, Mr. Watson states to be now worth about 1347. a year, and in the gift of Lord Palmerston.'

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Biography is never more usefully employed than when it ean record the formative period of the lives of men set apart for distinction. Horace has lifted the curtain from his own boyhood; of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Luther, thanks either to their own industry or vanity, or to the curiosity and zeal of their friends, we know nearly all we can. reasonably desire. Milton's years of 'ceaseless reading;' Gray's seclusion with his Virgil; Newton's meditations on his farm; Gibbon's studies at Lausanne and Petersfield; Wordsworth's early communings with nature; Chantrey's and Wilkie's prolusions with sticks blackened in the fire upon the whitewashed walls of a cottage, have braced the nerves and cheered the spirits of many a student and many an artist while obeying the instincts of their being amid difficulties, discouragement, and disappointment. But Warburton has not left even a sketch of himself at this period, nor did any of his friends think it worth their while to inquire into and put on record his

early habits or pursuits. That he had always a voracious appetite for learning there is no reason to doubt; his writings attest, his family and associates record, his close addiction to study, and an ill-natured pen confirms these family and friendly traditions. Churchill, with much venom, if with some truth, writes

of him :

'A curate first he read and read

And laid in-while he should have fed
The souls of his neglected flock
Of reading such a mighty stock,
That he o'ercharged the weary brain
With more than she could well contain,
More than she was with spirit fraught
To turn and methodise to thought.'

The rebuke came with an ill grace from one who, though he possessed some rugged virtues, set a good example to others neither while he wore, nor after he had cast off, his gown and cassock. And we ought to bear in mind that such neglect of duty was at the time a rule with few exceptions. The Anglican Church, in the eighteenth century, contained some bright examples of learning and holy living, but it was not generally conspicuous for its cure of souls. While Warburton was

hiving knowledge with each studious year,' the majority of his clerical brethren were, if in London, attending levées, or, if in the country, hunting with the squire in the morning, and drinking the squire's October in the evening. Of parsons not so highly favoured, the tavern was the club, and the squire's lawyer, bailiff, and huntsman were the companions. Clerical zeal appeared in abusing Wesley and Whitfield; clerical learning in sermons which sent the hearers of them to sleep; and clerical charity in thinking no evil of such as resorted to the parish church on the day of rest and frequented the parish alehouse on the days of labour. We do not apologise for Warburton's deficiencies as steward and minister; but if it is not well to leave the sheep in the wilderness, even that is better than leading them to the tavern.

It is not certain whether he ever resided at Greasely, which, indeed, he held little more than a year. In June, 1728, Sir Robert Sutton presented Warburton with the living of BrantBroughton, near Newark, of the value of 5607. a year; and in 1730 he was appointed by the Duke of Newcastle, probably through the same friendly baronet's influence, to the living of Frisby, in Lincolnshire, worth about 2501. a year,' which he continued to hold, though never residing on it, until 1756. He was now a rich man, for his wants were few and