After all, why would the commentator produce these five examples of the sources of the sublime, when, in another work, his Doctrine of Grace, he has laboured exceedingly to prove, that there is no such thing as sublimity, considered in itself; that sublimity is only the application of such images as arbitrary and casual connexions, rather than their own native grandeur, have dignified and ennobled; thus stripping, what ages have admired as elegant and great, of its imaginary value, and resolving it into chance, caprice, and fashion. This paradox, and the Defence of it, have been completely confuted by the learned and ingenious Dr. Leland, in a Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence. So truly is Warburton characterized by a nervous writer, who says, "he had an eager propensity to start aside from the regular and common orbit of opinion, upon every plain, every abstruse, every trifling, and every important subject." The same writer, with a spirit of impartiality that does him credid, adds, "The Bishop of Gloucester, amidst all his fooleries in criticism, and all his outrages in controversy, certainly united a most vigorous and comprehensive intellect, with an open and a generous heart." I will just add, that the antiparadisiacal state mentioned by this prelate in the additional book of the Div. Legation, published by the Bishop of Worcester, has displeased many serious and able judges.

If, after all, the Divine Legation is a work, as Dr. Hurd assures us it is, "of the most transcendent merit, whether we consider the invention or execution; a work so embellished by a lively fancy, and illustrated from all quarters by exquisite learning and the most ingenious disquisition, that, in the whole compass of modern or ancient theology, there is nothing equal or similar to this extraordinary performance;" if, to the authority of Hooker, the acuteness of Chillingworth, and the perspicuity of Locke, he added more than all their learning; if these rare and admirable qualifications shone out in him with greater lustre than in any other ornament of our church, Stillingfleet, and Barrow, and Taylor himself not excepted; if, I say, this high encomium of Dr, Hurd, on his all-accomplished friend, be just and well-founded, it surely is of small consequence to an author of such exalted and extraordinary merits to say, that his notes on Shakspeare and Pope are conceited, futile, and frivolous.

In the very last edition of Bishop Law's excellent translation of the Origin of Evil, is the following remarkable passage: "I had now the satisfaction of seeing, that those very principles

which had been maintained by Archbishop King, were adopted by Mr. Pope in his Essay on Man: this I used to recollect, and sometimes to relate, with pleasure, conceiving that such an account did no less honour to the poet than to our philosopher; but was soon made to understand, that any thing of that kind was taken highly amiss by one (i. e. Dr. Warburton), who had once held the doctrine of that same Essay to be rank atheism, but afterward turned a warm advocate for it, and thought proper to deny the account above mentioned, with heavy menaces against those who presumed to insinuate that Pope borrowed any thing from any man whatsoever.

Marmontel, in his Poetique, has given the following judgment on the Essay on Man: "Pope, dans les Epitres qui composent son Essai sur l'Homme, a fait voir combien la poesie pouvoit s'élever sur les ailes de la philosophie. C'est dommage que ce Poete n'ait pas eu autant de methode que de profondeur. Mais il avoit pris un systeme; il falloit le soutenir. Ce systeme lui offroit des difficultés épouvantables; il falloit ou les vaincre, ou les eviter le dernier parti etoit le plus sur et le plus commode; aussi pour repondre aux plaintes de l'homme sur les malheurs de son etat, lui donne-t-il le plus souvent des images pour des preuves, et des injures pour des raisons."

Still more contemptuous and degrading, than the opinion of this French critic, are the terms in which Dr. Johnson has spoken of this Essay, in which are so many splendid and highly-finished passages. "The subject," he says, "is perhaps not very proper for poetry; and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject: metaphysical morality was a new study; and he was proud of his acquisitions; and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense, and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers its naked excellence, what shall we discover? that we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant; that we do not uphold the chain of existence; and that we could not make one another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more; that the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of other animals; that if the world be made for man, it may be said that man was made for geese."

of

This sort of burlesque abstract, which may be so easily but so unjustly made of any composition whatever, is exactly similar to the imperfect and unfair representation which the same critic has

given of the beautiful imagery in Il Penseroso of Milton. Very different was the opinion of the ingenious and acute Dr. Balguy on the Essay on Man; who, in various passages of his excellent treatise, entitled, "Divine Benevolence," has manifestly copied many of its doctrines and reasonings; who has written two sermons on the vanity of our pursuits after knowledge, which contain, as hath been already observed, little more than is comprehended in ten lines of this Essay; and who has even done Pope the honour of prefixing to his admirable sermons, as a motto, the following sentence from the preface to this Essay; "If I could flatter myself that these Essays have any merit, it is in steering between the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite; in passing over terms utterly unintelligible; and in forming a temperate, yet not inconsistent system.”