peare, he lost no opportunities of visiting his enemies with taunts and sneers. The spirit of Scioppius was again let loose for a season, and exhibited no loss of virulence on its return to the upper air.

He

The extravagances of Warburton in his Shakspeare are scarcely exceeded by those of 'Bentley's Notes on Milton.' But the great critic fell flat, because he abandoned his proper region in philology, whereas Warburton played only his usual antics in this edition. He changed not only the words, but the thoughts of his author: he made straight places crooked, and smooth places rough. He rejected lines necessary for sense, and interpolated lines necessary for nonsense. made such ravages in Shakspeare's metre as a boar makes in a vineyard. He saw much that was not in the author, and was stone-blind to much that was. The Queen of Scots, in his hands, was turned into an allegorical mermaid;' the phrase ' majestic world' was interpreted first to be the orbis Romanus,' next to be an allusion to the Olympic Games.' Our space forbids us to weary the reader with his monstrous devices. The proper title of the edition is- William Shakspeare rewritten by William Warburton.' To Warburton, indeed, whenever he plays the verbal critic, may be repeated the words applied by Styan Thirlby to the laborious Grabe- Criticus non fuit, neque esse potuit, utpote neque ingenio neque judicio, neque, 'si verum dicere licet, doctrina satis ad eam rem instructus.'

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Warburton-we now turn from his writings to his life--in 1746, was appointed by Murray, then Solicitor-General, to the preachership of Lincoln's Inn. He could not refuse, but he made wry faces at the preferment. Writing to his friend, Dr. Taylor, an eminent physician at Newark, he says, ' Don't think I speak with any affectation when I tell you in your ear that nothing can be more disagreeable to me than this way of life. Don't you pity me? I shall be forced to write sermons, and God knows what will become of the "D. L."' In 1750 he published Julian,' which a friendly critic terms the gravest, the least eccentric, and the most convincing of 'his works,' and of which Gibbon more justly says that it is "strongly marked with all the characteristics of the Warbur'tonian school.' In 1753, he was presented by Lord Chancellor Hardwicke to a stall at Gloucester; and in the next year was appointed one of the king's chaplains in ordinary, on which occasion he took his doctor's degree, Archbishop Herring conferring what Oxford had withheld. His stall at Gloucester was in 1755 exchanged for one of greater value at Durham, and in 1757 Pitt procured for him, from the Duke of Newcastle,

VOL. CXXII. NO. CCXLIX.

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the Deanery of Bristol. Two years later, when Warburton was in his sixty-second year, he was appointed, again through Pitt's influence, Bishop of Gloucester. We have put together all his higher preferments, ranging over the space of eleven years. In the history of an ordinary divine these would be important events: in that of Warburton they are of secondary importance. Throughout this period he studied, published, wrangled, and thrust himself into nearly every quarrel of the time; and when he pronounced his Nolo Episcopari,' he had long been the most abusing and best abused man in the realm of King George II.

A far more important event in Warburton's life than his promotion to a stall, a deanery, or a throne, was his acquiring the friendship, or we may more properly term it the vassalship, of Dr. Hurd. As George Garrick was to David, as Boswell to Johnson, so was the Bishop of Worcester to the Bishop of Gloucester. 'What sort of man, sir, was Hurd?' asked Norton Nichols of Gray. 'He was the last person who left 'off stiff-topped gloves.' Seldom, if ever, was there a more characteristic description. Hurd was a stiff stately personage, a terse, neat, little, thin man,' as one of his college contemporaries described him. He wrote stiffly; he was stiff in opinion; he talked stiffly; he was stiff in his canonicals, and stiff out of them, if indeed he ever laid them aside. He kept his neighbours off by his distant and lofty carriage as effectually as if he had written over his palace door Man-traps and springguns set on these premises.' In conversation he was always on his guard. His curates, while he was Rector of Thurcaston, complained that he treated them with distance, or rather with disdain. Mr. Watson gives an extract from a letter of Hurd's to a Mr. Cradock, regarding an intended visit, specifying what he should like to eat and drink in his entertainer's house.' Had Charles Lamb seen it, we might have had an essay on the episcopal' style of writing, as a pendant to that on the lordly and gentlemanly style.' Hartlebury Church is not above a quarter of a mile from Hartlebury Castle, where this prim, if not primitive, Father in God resided, yet that quarter of a mile he always travelled in his episcopal coach, with his servants in full-dress liveries. He was, indeed, a most dutiful son to the plain honest people' his parents, a farmer and a farmer's wife,' and a kind if not an affectionate relative. But stateliness never forsook him. His brother's widow, a good dame who marred the king's English, and was sometimes a visitor at Hartlebury Castle, he led up with stately courtesy to the head of his table. It is no wonder that he

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wore stiff-topped gloves long after every one else had left them off. But no man is perfectly consistent. Stately and stiff to every other son of Adam, Hurd was supple to Warburton. Him, after their acquaintance began, he worshipped with oriental ceremony; him he lauded veniente et discedente die -in his eyes Warburton could do no wrong, nor anyone who opposed Warburton do right. He praised the works which even their author condemned; he exhausted the vocabulary of praise in commending the works which their author approved. One parson Towne went by the name of Warburton's 'tame jackal;' Doctors Balguy and Brown were no ordinary bottle-holders; but Hurd was a more obsequious lion's provider than Towne, and a more serviceable ally than Brown and Balguy combined. The soul of one of Menander's parasites might seem to have passed into the cassock of a Christian prelate.

We hold this subservience of Hurd to have been among the misfortunes of Warburton. No man ever stood more in need of a judicious friend, and no one ever had a more indiscreet one. He cherished Warburton's foibles, encouraged his feuds, cooled his friends, heated his enemies. Warburton used his controversial flail like Talus in the Faëry Queen;' Hurd handled his rapier like a master of fence. His Essay on the 'Delicacy of Friendship' did more mischief to his friend than either the wit of Lowth or the satire of Churchill. His keen sarcasm drew down on his own head an iron sleet of arrowy shower,' but many of the arrows pierced the Warburtonian cuirass also. To this malignant Essay it was owing that Gibbon shattered to pieces the Warburtonian theory of the Eleusinian Mysteries being disclosed in the sixth Eneid: to this also was due the tremendous volley which Dr. Parr discharged on Richard of Worcester, not without rebound on William of Gloucester.

The life of Warburton, if we take into account his extraordinary powers, is a disappointing one: the close of that life is profoundly saddening. His intellects seem to have decayed at about the same age as those of Swift, Marlborough and Southey. Early in 1771, when he was in his sixty-third year, Hurd assured Mrs. Warburton that her husband would write no more. In 1774, Horace Walpole found him at Gloucester, very infirm, speaking with much hesitation, and beginning to lose his memory." In the next year his faculties were still more clouded and enfeebled by the loss of his only son and only child. From that moment his literary labours and even his amusements ceased. 'His boy,' he said, ' was half his soul.' He lived on, indeed, for two or three years; but

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when he had settled his affairs, and provided amply for his wife, he took no further concern in anything that had once interested him. The voracious appetite for knowledge palled; the restless brain at length reposed; 'memory' at last had its 'full fraught,' and was swiftly yielding to mere forgetfulness.' The last question he asked was, 'Is my son really dead or ' not?' The attendant hesitated, and then answered, He is 'dead.' I thought so,' said Warburton, and soon after expired. He was buried in his cathedral, but his death attracted little notice; and he who had drawn on himself the attention of the learned world, at home and abroad, during forty years, passed away as silently as his ancestors who had borne but never made conspicuous the name of Warburton.

The silence attending Warburton's departure from a world he had so often disquieted, was prefigurative of the fate of his works. He was almost forgotten when he died; they have been neglected since his death. Bentley, when drawing near to the term of his equally troubled days, had yet the consolation of knowing that his edifice, both in philology and theology, could be materially impaired neither by posthumous assailants, nor popular neglect, nor caprice of fashion. He said, and he said justly, when his pen rested from its labours and his eye was waxing dim

'Vixi, et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi,

Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.'

But Warburton could lay no such flattering unction to his soul.' His magnum opus' was unfinished; he despaired of it himself; it had been punched full of deadly holes' by his opponents; the apologies it demanded had absorbed his time, and he realised in their full bitterness the lines of the satirist :

'Amphora cœpit

Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit?'

ART. II.—1. Traitement Moral, Hygiène et Education des Idiots et des autres Enfants Arriérés, &c. Par ÉDOUARD SEGUIN. Paris: 1846,

2. Remarks, Theoretical and Practical, on the Education of Idiots and Children of Weak Intellect. By W. R. SCOTT, Ph. D. London: 1847.

3. Die Heilung und Verhütung des Cretinismus und Ihre Neuesten Fortschritte. Dr. Med. J. GUGGENBÜHL. Bern und St. Gallen: 1853.

4. Teaching the Idiot.

A Lecture at St. Martin's Hall, London, August 4, 1854, in connexion with the Educational Exhibition of the Society of Arts and Manufactures. By the Rev. EDWIN SIDNEY, A.M. London: 1854.

5. Die gegenwärtige Lage der Cretinen, Blödfinnigen und Idioten in den Christlichen Ländern. JULIUS DESSELHOFF. Bonn: 1857.

6. The Mind Unveiled. Philadelphia: 1858.

7. The Causes of Idiocy. Being the Supplement to a Report by Dr. S. G. Howe and the other Commissioners appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts to inquire into the condition of the Idiots of the Commonwealth. Edinburgh: 1858. 8. Two Visits to Earlswood Asylum for Idiots, 1859 and 1861. By the Rev. EDWIN SIDNEY, A.M. London: 1859 and 1861.

9. Eighth Annual Report of the Pennsylvanian Training School for Feeble-minded Children. Philadelphia: 1861. 10. The Method of Drill, the Gymnastic Exercises, and the Manner of Teaching Speaking used at Essex Hall, Colchester, for Idiots, Simpletons, and Feeble-minded Children. By E. MARTIN DUNCAN, M.B. (Londini). London: 1861. 11. The Idiot and his Helpers. By W. MILLARD, Essex Hall, Colchester. 1864.

12. Lunacy and Law, together with Hints on the Treatment of Idiots. By F. E. D. BYRNE, L.R.C.P. and M.R.C.S. London: 1864.

Idiots, June 16,
London: 1864.

13. A Fête Day at Earlswood Asylum for 1864. By the Rev. EDWIN SIDNEY, A.M. 14. The Training of Idiotic and Feeble-minded Children. By CHEYNE BRADY, Esq., M.R.I.H. Dublin: 1864. IDIOTCY is unquestionably one of the most fearful of the host of maladies, which pass like gloomy shadows over the