e Chancellor of Lincoln, intrepid
as he was, stands like a man of straw, to be buffeted and tossed about
with all those arts of distortion which the wit and virulence of
Warburton almost every day was practising at his "established places
of execution," as his prefaces and notes have been wittily termed.

Even Warburton himself, who committed so many personal injuries, has,
in his turn, most eminently suffered from the same motive. The
personal animosity of a most ingenious man was the real cause of the
utter destruction of Warburton's critical reputation. Edwards, the
author of the "Canons of Criticism," when young and in the army, was a
visitor at Allen's of Prior-park, the patron of Warburton; and in
those literary conversations which usually occupied their evenings,
Warburton affected to show his superiority in his acquaintance with
the Greek writers, never suspecting that a red coat covered more Greek
than his own--which happened unluckily to be the case. Once, Edwards
in the library, taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a
manner which did not suit probably with some new theory of the great
inventor of so many; a contest arose, in which Edwards discovered how
Warburton came by his illegitimate knowledge of Greek authors: Edwards
attempted to convince him that he really did not understand Greek, and
that his knowledge, such as it was, was derived from French
translations--a provoking act of literary kindness, which took place
in the presence of Ralph Allen and his niece, who, though they could
not stand as umpires, did as witnesses. An incurable breach took place
between the parties, and from this trifling altercation, Edwards
produced the bitter "Canons of Criticism," and Warburton those foaming
notes in the _Dunciad_.

Such is the implacable nature of literary irascibility! Men so
tenderly alive to intellectual sensibility, find even the lightest
touch profoundly enter into the morbid constitution of the literary
temper; and even minds of a more robust nature have given proof of a
sickly delicacy hanging about them quite unsuspected. Swift is a
remarkable instance of this kind: the foundation of the character of
this great wit was his excellent sense. Yet having, when young,
composed one of the wild Pindarics of the time, addressed to the
Athenian Society, and Dryden judiciously observing that "cousin
Jonathan would never be a poet," the enraged wit, after he had reached
the maturity of his own adm