difficulty in proving that the "Essay on Criticism" was in
fact an Essay on Man, and the reverse. Pope, before he knew
Warburton, always spoke of his "Essay on Criticism" as "an
irregular collection of thoughts thrown together as Horace's
'Art of Poetry' was." "As for the 'Essay on Man,'" says
Richardson, "I _know_ that he never dreamed of the scheme he
afterwards adopted; but he had taken terror about the clergy,
and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism
and deistical tendency, of which my father and I talked with
him frequently at Twickenham, without his appearing to
understand it, or ever thinking to alter those passages which
we suggested."--This extract is to be valued, for the
information is authentic; and it assists us in throwing some
light on the subtilty of Warburton's critical impositions.

[180] The postscript to Warburton's "Dedication to the Freethinkers,"
is entirely devoted to Akenside; with this bitter opening,
"The Poet was too full of the subject and of himself."

[181] "An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, occasioned by his
Treatment of the Author of 'The Pleasures of the Imagination,'"
1744. While Dyson repels Warburton's accusations against "the
Poet," he retorts some against the critic himself. Warburton
often perplexed a controversy by a subtile change of a word;
or by breaking up a sentence; or by contriving some absurdity in
the shape of an inference, to get rid of it in a mock
triumph. These little weapons against the laws of war are
insidiously practised in the war of words. Warburton never
replied.

[182] The paradoxical title of his great work was evidently designed
to attract the unwary. "The Divine Legation of Moses
demonstrated--_from the omission of a future state_!" It
was long uncertain whether it was "a covert attack on
Christianity, instead of a defence of it." I have here no
concern with Warburton's character as a polemical theologist;
this has been the business of that polished and elegant
scholar, Bishop Lowth, who has shown what it is to be in
Hebrew literature "a Quack in Commentatorship, and a
Mountebank in Criticism." He has fully entered into all the
absurdity of Warburton's "i