must have lost his temper if he ever read the dedication! Let
us not, however, imagine that Warburton was at all insensible
to this violation of literary decorum; he only sacrificed
_propriety_ to what he considered a more urgent principle--his
own personal interest. No one had a juster conception of the
true nature of _dedications_; for he says in the famous one
"to the Free-thinkers:"--"I could never approve the custom of
dedicating books to men whose professions made them strangers
to the subject. A Discourse on the Ten Predicaments to a
Leader of Armies, or a System of Casuistry to a Minister of
State, always appeared to me a high absurdity."

All human characters are mixed--true! yet still we feel
indignant to discover some of the greatest often combining the
most opposite qualities; and then they are not so much mixed
as the parts are naturally joined together. Could one imagine
that so lofty a character as Warburton could have been liable
to have incurred even the random stroke of the satirist?
whether true or false, the events of his life, better known at
this day than in his own, will show. Churchill says that

"He could cringe and creep, be civil,
And hold a stirrup to the devil,
If, _in a journey to his mind_,
He'd let him mount, and ride behind."

The author of the "Canons of Criticism," with all his
sprightly sarcasm, gives a history of Warburton's later
Dedications. "The first edition of 'The Alliance' came out
without a dedication, but was presented to the bishops; and
when nothing came of that, the second was addressed to both
the Universities; and when nothing came of that, the third was
dedicated to a noble Earl, and nothing has yet come of that."
Appendix to "Canons of Criticism," seventh edit. 261.

[153] The palace here alluded to is fully described in a volume of
"Travels through Sicily and Malta," by P. Brydone, F.R.S., in
1770. He describes it as belonging to "the Prince of Palermo,
a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to
the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more
ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the
wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry."