ever, this
absurdity, that in freely exposing the servile practices of
dedicators, the writer was himself indulging in that luxurious sin,
which he so forcibly terms "Public Prostitution." This early
management betrays no equivocal symptoms of that traffic in
_Dedications_, of which he has been so severely accused,[152] and of
that paradoxical turn and hardy effrontery which distinguished his
after-life. These dedications led to preferment, and thus hardily was
laid the foundation-stone of his aspiring fortunes.

Till his thirtieth year, Warburton evinced a depraved taste, but a
craving appetite for knowledge. His mind was constituted to be more
struck by the Monstrous than the Beautiful, much like that Sicilian
prince who furnished his villa with the most hideous figures
imaginable:[153] the delight resulting from harmonious and delicate
forms raised emotions of too weak a nature to move his obliquity of
taste; roused, however, by the surprise excited by colossal ugliness.
The discovery of his intellectual tastes, at this obscure period of
his life, besides in those works we have noticed, is confirmed by one
of the most untoward accidents which ever happened to a literary man;
it was the chance-discovery of a letter he had written to one of the
heroes of the Dunciad, forty years before. At the time that letter
was written, his literary connexions were formed with second-rate
authors; he was in strict intimacy with Concanen and Theobald, and
other "ingenious gentlemen who made up our last night's conversation,"
as he expresses himself.[154] This letter is full of the heresies of
taste: one of the most anomalous is the comment on that well-known
passage in Shakspeare, on "the genius and the mortal instruments;"
Warburton's is a miraculous specimen of fantastical sagacity and
critical delirium, or the art of discovering meanings never meant, and
of illustrations the author could never have known. Warburton declares
to "the ingenious gentlemen," (whom afterwards with a Pharaoh's heart
he hanged by dozens to posterity in the "Dunciad,") that "Pope
borrowed for want of genius;" that poet, who, when the day arrived, he
was to comment on as the first of poets! His insulting criticisms on
the popular writings of Addison,--his contempt for what Young calls
"sweet elegant Virgilian prose,"--show how utterly insensible he was
to that classical taste in which Addison had constructed his
materials. But he who could not taste the de