greatly to increase my indolence. This makes my reading wild
and desultory; and I seek refuge from _the uneasiness of
thought_, from any book, let it be what it will. _By my manner
of writing upon subjects, you would naturally imagine they
afford me pleasure, and attach me thoroughly. I will assure
you_, No!"--Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," vol. v. p. 562.

Warburton had not the cares of a family--they were merely
literary ones. The secret cause of his "melancholy," and his
"indolence," and that "want of attachment and pleasure to his
subjects;" which his friends "naturally imagined" afforded him
so much, was the controversies he had kindled, and the
polemical battles he had raised about him. However boldly he
attacked in return, his heart often sickened in privacy; for
how often must he have beheld his noble and his whimsical
edifices built on sands, which the waters were perpetually
eating into!

At the last interview of Warburton with Pope, the dying poet
exhorted him to proceed with "The Divine Legation." "Your
reputation," said he, "as well as your duty, is concerned in
it. People say you can get no farther in your proof. Nay, Lord
Bolingbroke himself bids me expect no such thing." This
anecdote is rather extraordinary; for it appears in "Owen
Ruffhead's Life of Pope," p. 497, a work written under the eye
of Warburton himself; and in which I think I could point out
some strong touches from his own hand on certain important
occasions, when he would not trust to the creeping dulness of
Ruffhead.

[163] His temerity had raised against him not only infidels, but
Christians. If any pious clergyman now wrote in favour of the
opinion that God's people believed in the immortality of the
soul--which can we doubt they did? and which Menasseh Ben
Israel has written his treatise, "De Resurrectione Mortuorum,"
to prove--it was a strange sight to behold a bishop seeming to
deny so rational and religious a creed! Even Dr. Balguy
confessed to Warburton, that "there was one thing in the
argument of the 'Divine Legation' that stuck more with candid
men than all the rest--how a religion without a future state
could be worthy of God!" This