ousand years were battered by the
"fiddling Conyers" into a solitary fragment of little value! Bentley
returned the subscription-money, and would not publish; the work still
lies in its prepared state, and some good judges of its value have
expressed a hope to see it yet published. But Bentley himself was not
untainted in this dishonourable quarrel: he well knew that Middleton
was the author of this severe attack; but to show his contempt of the
real author, and desirous, in his turn, of venting his disappointment
on a Dr. Colbatch, he chose to attribute it to him, and fell on
Colbatch with a virulence that made the reply perfectly libellous, if
it was Bentley's, as was believed.

The irascibility of Middleton, disguising itself in a literary form,
was still more manifested by a fact recorded of him by Bishop Newton.
He had applied to Sir Robert Walpole for the mastership of the
Charter-house, who honestly informed him that Bishop Sherlock, with
the other Bishops, were against his being chosen. Middleton attributed
the origin of this opposition to Bishop Sherlock, and wreaked his
vengeance by publishing his "Animadversions upon Sherlock's Discourses
on Prophecy." The book had been long published, and had passed through
successive editions; but Middleton pretended he had never seen them
before, and from this time Lambeth-house was a strong provocative for
his vindictive temper.

Nor was the other great adversary of Middleton, he who so long
affected to be the lord paramount, the Suzerain in the feudal empire,
rather than the republic of letters--Warburton himself--less easily
led on to these murderous acts of personal rancour. A pamphlet of the
day has preserved an anecdote of this kind. Dr. Taylor, the Chancellor
of Lincoln, once threw out in company an opinion derogatory to the
scholarship of Warburton, who seems to have had always some choice
spirits of his legion as spies in the camp of an enemy, and who sought
their tyrant's grace by their violation of the social compact. The
tyrant himself had an openness, quite in contrast with the dark
underworks of his satellites. He boldly interrogated our critic, and
Taylor replied, undauntedly and more poignantly than Warburton might
have suspected, that "he did not recollect ever _saying_ that Dr.
Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always _thought_ so."
To this intrepid spirit the world owes one of the remarkable prefaces
to the "Divine Legation"--in which th