declaring,
after this sally, that Warburton "has very unfortunately used
the word _impudent_ (which epithet Warburton had applied to
him), as it naturally reminds every reader that the pamphlet
published about two years ago, addressed 'to the most impudent
man living,' was universally acknowledged to be dedicated to
our commentator." Warburton had always the _Dunciad_ in his
head when a new quarrel was rising, which produced an odd
blunder on the side of Edwards, and provoked that wit to be as
dull as Cooper. Warburton said, in one of his notes on
Edwards, who had entitled himself "a gentleman of Lincoln's
Inn,"--"This gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, is
in reality a gentleman only of the _Dunciad_, or, to speak him
better, in the plain language of our honest ancestors to such
mushrooms, a _gentleman of the last edition_." Edwards
misunderstood the allusion, and sore at the personal attack
which followed, of his having "eluded the solicitude of his
careful father," considered himself "degraded of his
gentility," that it was "a reflection on his birth," and
threatened to apply to "Mr. Warburton's Masters of the Bench,
for degrading a 'barrister of their house.'" This afforded a
new triumph to Warburton, in a new note, where he explains his
meaning of these "mushrooms," whom he meant merely as literary
ones; and assures "Fungoso and his friends, who are all
gentlemen, that he meant no more than that Edwards had become
a gentleman _of the last edition of the Dunciad_!" Edwards and
his fungous friends had understood the phrase as applied to
new-fangled gentry. One of these wits, in the collection of
verses cited above, says to Warburton:--

"This mushroom has made sauce for you.
He's meat; thou'rt poison--plain enough--
If he's a _mushroom_, thou'rt a _puff_!"

Warburton had the full command over the _Dunciad_, even when
Pope was alive, for it was in consequence of Warburton's being
refused a degree at Oxford, that the poet, though one had been
offered to himself, produced the celebrated lines of "Apollo's
Mayor and Aldermen," in the fourth _Dunciad_. Thus it is that
the personal likes and dislikes of witty men c