weapon with proper orders into his hands. You think, it seems,
that I ought to have taken my beating quietly and patiently,
in respect to the livery which he wore. I was not of so tame a
disposition: I wrested the weapon from him, and broke it. Your
lordship, it seems, by an oblique blow, got an unlucky rap on
the knuckles; though you may thank yourself for it, you lay
the blame on me."--LOWTH'S _Letter to W._, p. 11.

Warburton and Hurd frequently concerted together on the manner
of attack and defence. In one of these letters of Hurd's it is
very amusing to read--"Taylor is a more creditable dunce than
Webster. What do you think to do with the Appendix against
Tillard and Sykes? Why might not Taylor rank with them," &c.
The Warburtonians had also a system of _espionage_. When Dr.
Taylor was accused by one of them of having _said_ that
Warburton was no scholar, the learned Grecian replied that he
did not recollect ever _saying_ that Dr. Warburton was no
scholar, but that indeed he had always _thought_ so. Hence a
tremendous quarrel! Hurd, the Mercury of our Jupiter, cast the
first light shaft against the doctor, then Chancellor of
Lincoln, by alluding to the Preface of his work on Civil Law
as "_a certain thing_ prefatory to a learned work, intituled
'The Elements of Civil Law:'" but at length Jove himself
rolled his thunder on the hapless chancellor. The doctor had
said in his work, that "the Roman emperors persecuted the
first Christians, not so much from a dislike of their tenets
as from a jealousy of their nocturnal assemblies." Warburton's
doctrine was, that "they held nocturnal assemblies because of
the persecution of their enemies." One was the fact, and the
other the consequence. But the Chancellor of Lincoln was to be
outrageously degraded among the dunces! that was the real
motive; the "nocturnal assemblies" only the ostensible one. A
pamphleteer, in defence of the chancellor, in reply, thought
that in "this literary persecution" it might be dangerous "if
Dr. Taylor should be provoked to _prove in print_ what he only
_dropped in conversation_." How innocent was this gentleman of
the arts and stratagems of logomachy, or book-wars