on." The
doctor insisted that Warburton had had sufficient share in
those very notes to be considered as one of the "Coadjutors."
"I may venture to say, that whoever was the _fool of the
company_ before he entered (or _the fool of the piece_, in his
own diction) he was certainly so after he engaged in that
work; for, as Ben Jonson observes, 'he that _thinks_ himself
the _Master-Wit_ is commonly the _Master-Fool_.'"

[174] Warburton certainly used little intrigues: he trafficked with
the obscure Reviews of the times. He was a correspondent in
"The Works of the Learned," where the account of his first
volume of the Divine Legation, he says, is "a nonsensical
piece of stuff;" and when Dr. Doddridge offered to draw up
an article for his second, the favour was accepted, and it
was sent to the miserable journal, though acknowledged "to be
too good for it." In the same journal were published all
his specimens of Shakspeare, some years after they had
appeared in the "General Dictionary," with a high character of
these wonderful discoveries.--"The Alliance," when first
published, was announced in "The Present State of the
Republic of Letters," to be the work of a gentleman whose
capacity, judgment, and learning deserve some eminent dignity
in the Church of England, of which he is "now an inferior
minister."--One may presume to guess at "the gentleman," a
little impatient for promotion, who so much cared whether
Warburton was only "now an inferior minister."

These are little arts. Another was, that Warburton sometimes
acted Falstaff's part, and ran his sword through the dead! In
more instances than one this occurred. Sir Thomas Hanmer was
dead when Warburton, then a bishop, ventured to assert that
Sir Thomas's letter concerning their intercourse about
Shakspeare was "one continued falsehood from beginning to
end." The honour and veracity of Hanmer must prevail over the
"liveliness" of Warburton, for Hurd lauds his "_lively_
preface to his Shakspeare." But the "Biographia Britannica"
bears marks of Warburton's violence, in a cancelled sheet. See
the _Index_, art. HANMER; [where we are told "the sheet being
castrated at the instance of Mr., now