[252] ’Warburton, whatever was his motive, undertook without solicitation to rescue Pope from the talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the imputation of favouring fatality, or rejecting revelation; and from month to month continued a vindication of the Essay on Man in the literary journal of that time, called the Republick of Letters’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 289.  Pope wrote to Warburton of the Essay on Man:—­’You understand my work better than I do myself.’  Pope’s Works, ed. 1886, ix. 211.

[253] See ante, ii. 37, note I, and Pope’s Works, ed. 1886, ix. 220.  Allen was Ralph Allen of Prior Park near Bath, to whom Fielding dedicated Amelia, and who is said to have been the original of Allworthy in Tom Jones.  It was he of whom Pope wrote:—­

     ’Let low-born Allen, with an awkward shame,
      Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame.’

Epilogue to the Satires, i. 135.

Low-born in later editions was changed to humble.  Warburton not only married his niece, but, on his death, became in her right owner of Prior Park.

[254] Mr. Mark Pattison (Satires of Pope, p. 158) points out Warburton’s ’want of penetration in that subject [metaphysics] which he considered more peculiarly his own.’  He said of ‘the late Mr. Baxter’ (Andrew Baxter, not Richard Baxter), that ’a few pages of his reasoning have not only more sense and substance than all the elegant discourses of Dr. Berkeley, but infinitely better entitle him to the character of a great genius.’

[255] It is of Warburton that Churchill wrote in The Duellist (Poems, ed. 1766, ii. 82):—­

     ’To prove his faith which all admit
      Is at least equal to his wit,
      And make himself a man of note,
      He in defence of Scripture wrote;
      So long he wrote, and long about it,
      That e’en believers ‘gan to doubt it.’

[256] I find some doubt has been entertained concerning Dr. Johnson’s meaning here.  It is to be supposed that he meant, ’when a king shall again be entertained in Scotland.’  BOSWELL.

[257] Perhaps among these ladies was the Miss Burnet of Monboddo, on whom Burns wrote an elegy.

[258] In the Rambler, No. 98, entitled The Necessity of Cultivating Politeness, Johnson says:—­’The universal axiom in which all complaisance is included, and from which flow all the formalities which custom has established in civilized nations, is, That no man shall give any preference to himself.’ In the same paper, he says that ‘unnecessarily to obtrude unpleasing ideas is a species of oppression.’

[259] Act ii. sc. 5.

[260] Perhaps he was referring to Polyphemus’s club, which was

     ’Of height and bulk so vast
      The largest ship might claim it for a mast.’

Pope’s Odyssey, ix. 382.