apply with greater force to
literary history itself, which, being often the mere history of the
human mind, has to record opinions as well as events--to discuss as
well as to narrate--to show how accepted truths become suspicious--or
to confirm what has hitherto rested in obscure uncertainty, and to
balance contending opinions and opposite facts with critical nicety.
The multiplied means of our knowledge now opened to us, have only
rendered our curiosity more urgent in its claims, and raised up the
most diversified objects. These, though accessories to the leading one
of our inquiries, can never melt together in the continuity of a text.
It is to prevent all this disorder, and to enjoy all the usefulness
and the pleasure of this various knowledge, which has produced the
invention of _notes_ in literary history. All this forms a sort of
knowledge peculiar to the present more enlarged state of literature.
Writers who delight in curious and rare extracts, and in the discovery
of new facts and new views of things, warmed by a fervour of research
which brings everything nearer to our eye and close to our touch,
study to throw contemporary feelings in their page. Such rare extracts
and such new facts BAYLE eagerly sought, and they delighted JOHNSON;
but all this luxury of literature can only be produced to the public
eye in the variegated forms of _notes_.

WARBURTON, AND HIS QUARRELS;

INCLUDING AN ILLUSTRATION OF
HIS LITERARY CHARACTER

The name of Warburton more familiar to us than his Works--declared
to be "a Colossus" by a Warburtonian, who afterwards shrinks the
image into "a human size"--Lowth's caustic retort on his
Attorneyship--motives for the change to Divinity--his first
literary mischances--Warburton and his Welsh Prophet--his
Dedications--his mean flatteries--his taste more struck by the
monstrous than the beautiful--the effects of his opposite
studies--the SECRET PRINCIPLE which conducted Warburton through all
his Works--the _curious_ argument of his Alliance between Church and
State--the _bold_ paradox of his Divine Legation--the demonstration
ends in a conjecture--Warburton lost in the labyrinth he had
ingeniously constructed--confesses the harassed state of his
mind--attacked by Infidels and Christians--his SECRET PRINCIPLE
turns the poetical narrative of AEneas into the Eleusinian
Mysteries--Hurd attacks Jortin; his Attic irony translated into
plain English--Warbu