! The
_proof_ would not have altered the cause: Hurd would have
disputed it tooth and nail; Warburton was running greater
risks, every day of his life, than any he was likely to
receive from this flourish in the air. The great purpose was
to make the Chancellor of Lincoln the butt of his sarcastic
pleasantry; and this object was secured by Warburton's forty
pages of preface, in which the chancellor stands to be
buffeted like an ancient quintain, "a mere lifeless block."
All this came upon him for only _thinking_ that Warburton was
no _scholar_!

[186] See what I have said at the close of the note, pp. 262-3. In a
collection entitled "Verses occasioned by Mr. Warburton's late
Edition of Mr. Pope's Works," 1751, are numerous epigrams,
parodies, and similes on it. I give one:--

"As on the margin of Thames' silver flood
Stand little _necessary_ piles of wood,
So Pope's fair page appears with _notes_ disgraced:
Put down the nuisances, ye men of taste!"

Lowth has noticed the use Warburton made of his patent for
vending Pope. "I thought you might possibly whip me at the
cart's-tail in a note to the 'Divine Legation,' the ordinary
place of your literary executions; or _pillory me in the
Dunciad_, another engine which, as legal proprietor, you have
very ingeniously and judiciously applied to the same purpose;
or, perhaps, have ordered me a kind of Bridewell correction,
by one of your beadles, in a pamphlet."--LOWTH'S _"Letter to
Warburton,"_ p. 4.

Warburton carried the licentiousness of the pen in all these
notes to the _Dunciad_ to a height which can only be
paralleled in the gross logomachies of Schioppius, Gronovius,
and Scaliger, and the rest of that snarling crew. But his wit
exceeded even his grossness. He was accused of not sparing--

"Round-house wit and Wapping choler."
[Verses occasioned by Mr. W.'s late Edition of Pope.]

And one of his most furious assailants thus salutes
him:--"Whether you are a wrangling Wapping attorney, a
pedantic pretender to criticism, an impudent paradoxical
priest, or an animal yet stranger, an heterogeneous medley of
all three, as your farraginous style seems to conf