hristianity, the three great
religions of mankind, were to be marshalled in all their pomp, and
their awe, and their mystery. But the procession changed to a battle!
To maintain one great paradox, he was branching out into innumerable
ones. This great work was never concluded: the author wearied himself,
without, however, wearying his readers; and, as his volumes appeared,
he was still referring to his argument, "as far as it is yet
advanced." The _demonstration_ appeared in great danger of ending in a
_conjecture_; and this work, always beginning and never ending, proved
to be the glory and misery of his life.[162] In perpetual conflict
with those numerous adversaries it roused, Warburton often shifted
his ground, and broke into so many divisions, that when he cried out,
Victory! his scattered forces seemed rather to be in flight than in
pursuit.[163]

The same SECRET PRINCIPLE led him to turn the poetical narrative of
AEneas in the infernal regions, an episode evidently imitated by Virgil
from his Grecian master, into a minute description of the initiation
into the Eleusinian Mysteries. A notion so perfectly new was at least
worth a commonplace truth. Was it not delightful to have so many
particulars detailed of a secret transaction, which even its
contemporaries of two thousand years ago did not presume to know
anything about? Father Hardouin seems to have opened the way for
Warburton, since he had discovered that the whole AEneid was an
allegorical voyage of St. Peter to Rome! When Jortin, in one of his
"Six Dissertations," modestly illustrated Virgil by an interpretation
inconsistent with Warburton's strange discovery, it produced a
memorable quarrel. Then Hurd, the future shield, scarcely the sword,
of Warburton, made his first sally; a dapper, subtle, and cold-blooded
champion, who could dexterously turn about the polished weapon of
irony.[164] So much our _Railleur_ admired the volume of Jortin, that
he favoured him with "A Seventh Dissertation, addressed to the Author
of the Sixth, on the Delicacy of Friendship," one of the most
malicious, but the keenest pieces of irony. It served as the
foundation of a new School of Criticism, in which the arrogance of the
master was to be supported by the pupil's contempt of men often his
superiors. To interpret Virgil differently from the modern Stagirite,
was, by the aggravating art of the ridiculer, to be considered as the
violation of a moral feeling.[165] Jortin bore t