ntain that
Evans was both a real prophet and an impostor." Yet this is
not the only awkward attitude into which Warburton has here
thrown himself. To strain the vision of the raving Welshman to
events of which he could have no notion, Warburton has plunged
into the most ludicrous difficulties, all which ended, as all
his discoveries have done, in making the fortune of an
adversary who, like the Momus of Homer, has raised through the
skies "inextinguishable laughter," in the amusing tract of
"Confusion worse Confounded, Rout on Rout, or the Bishop of
G----'s Commentary on Arise Evans; by Indignatio," 1772. The
writer was the learned Henry Taylor, the author of Ben
Mordecai's Apology.

[151] The correct taste of Lowth with some humour describes the last
sentence of the "Enquiry on Prodigies" as "the Musa Pedestris
got on horseback in a high prancing style." He printed it in
measured lines, without, however, changing the place of a
single word, and it produced blank verse. Thus it reads--

"Methinks I see her like the mighty Eagle
renewing her immortal youth, and purging
her opening sight at the unobstructed beams
of our benign meridian Sun," &c.

Such a glowing metaphor, in the uncouth prose of Warburton,
startled Lowth's classical ear. It was indeed "the Musa
Pedestris who had got on horseback in a high prancing style;"
for as it has since been pointed out, it is a well-known
passage towards the close of the Areopagitica of Milton, whose
prose is so often purely poetical. See Birch's Edition of
Milton's Prose Works, I. 158. Warburton was familiarly
conversant with our great vernacular writers at a time when
their names generally were better known than their works, and
when it was considered safe to pillage their most glorious
passages. Warburton has been convicted of snatching their
purple patches, and sewing them into his coarser web, without
any acknowledgment; he did this in the present remarkable
instance, and at a later day, in the preface to his "Julian,"
he laid violent hands on one of Raleigh's splendid metaphors.

[152] When Warburton was considered as a Colossus of literature,
RALPH, the political writer, pointe