Having availed myself of this editor’s eulogy on my departed friend, for which I warmly thank him, let me not suffer the lustre of his reputation, honestly acquired by profound learning and vigorous eloquence, to be tarnished by a charge of illiberality.  He has been accused of invidiously dragging again into light certain writings of a person respectable by his talents, his learning, his station and his age, which were published a great many years ago, and have since, it is said, been silently given up by their authour.  But when it is considered that these writings were not sins of youth, but deliberate works of one well-advanced in life, overflowing at once with flattery to a great man of great interest in the Church, and with unjust and acrimonious abuse of two men of eminent merit; and that, though it would have been unreasonable to expect an humiliating recantation, no apology whatever has been made in the cool of the evening, for the oppressive fervour of the heat of the day; no slight relenting indication has appeared in any note, or any corner of later publications; is it not fair to understand him as superciliously persevering?  When he allows the shafts to remain in the wounds, and will not stretch forth a lenient hand, is it wrong, is it not generous to become an indignant avenger?  BOSWELL.  Boswell wrote on Feb. 16, 1789:—­’There is just come out a publication which makes a considerable noise.  The celebrated Dr. Parr, of Norwich, has—­wickedly, shall we say?—­but surely wantonly—­published Warburton’s Juvenile Translations and Discourse on Prodigies, and Bishop Kurd’s attacks on Jortin and Dr. Thomas Leland, with his Essay on the Delicacy of Friendship.’ Letters of Boswell, p. 275.  The ‘editor,’ therefore, is Parr, and the ‘Warburtonian’ is Hurd.  Boswell had written to Parr on Jan. 10, 1791:—­’I request to hear by return of post if I may say or guess that Dr. Parr is the editor of these tracts.’  Parr’s Works, viii. 12.  See also ib. iii. 405.

[168] In Johnson’s Works (1787), xi. 213, it is said, that this meeting was ’at the Bishop of St. ——­’s [Asaph’s].  Boswell, by his ‘careful enquiry,’ no doubt meant to show that this statement was wrong.  Johnson is reported to have said:—­’ Dr. Warburton at first looked surlily at me; but after we had been jostled into conversation he took me to a window, asked me some questions, and before we parted was so well pleased with me that he patted me.’

[169] ’Warburton’s style is copious without selection, and forcible without neatness; he took the words that presented themselves; his diction is coarse and impure; and his sentences are unmeasured.’  Johnson’s Works, viii. 288.

[170] Churchill, in The Duellist (Poems ed. 1766, ii. 85), describes Warburton as having

     ’A heart, which virtue ne’er disgraced;
      A head where learning runs to waste.’

[171] Works, viii. 230.