sumptuous, I was almost the Master Betty of the time; but as I dare say that young gentleman is even now too old and too wise to be spoilt by popularity, so was I then not quite boy enough to be tickled by it, and not quite fool enough to confide in it. In short I took the same course then which he is taking now; as he keeps on acting part after part, so did I persist in writing play after play; and this, if I am not mistaken, is the surest course we either of us could take of running through our period of popularity, and of finding our true level at the conclusion of it.

I recollect the fate of a young artist in Northamptonshire, who was famous for his adroitness in pointing and repairing the spires of church-steeples; he formed his scaffolds with consummate ingenuity, and mounted his ladders with incredible success. The spire of the church of Raunds was of prodigious height; it overpeered all its neighbours, as Shakespear does all his rivals; the young adventurer was employed to fix the weather-cock; he mounted to the topmost stone, in which the spindle was bedded; universal plaudits hailed him in his ascent; he found himself at the very achme of

his fame, but glorious ambition tempted him to quit his ladder, and occupy the place of the weather-cock, standing upon one leg, while he sung a song to amaze the rustic multitude below: what the song was, and how many stanzas he lived to get through I do not know; he sung it in too large a theatre, and was somewhat out of hearing; but it is in my memory to know that he came to his cadence before his song did, and falling from his height left the world to draw its moral from his melancholy fate.

I now for the first time entered the lists of controversy, and took up the gauntlet of a renowned champion to vindicate the insulted character of my grandfather Doctor Bentley. The offensive passage met me in a pamphlet written by Bishop Lowth professedly against Warburton, acrimonious enough of all conscience, and unepiscopally intemperate in the highest degree, even if his lordship had not gone out of his course to hurl this dirt upon the coffin of my ancestor. The bishop is now dead, and I will not use his name irreverently; my grandfather was dead, yet he stept aside to hook him in as a mere verbal critic, who in

matters of taste and elegant literature he asserts was contemptibly deficient, and then he resorts to his Catullus for the most disgraceful names he can give him as a scholar or a gentleman, and says he was aut caprimulgus aut fossor, terms, that in English, would have been downright blackguardism.

All the world knows that Warburton and Lowth had mouthed and mumbled each other till their very bands blushed and their lawnsleeves were bloody. I should have thought that the prelate, who had Warburton for his antagonist, would hardly have found leisure from his own self-defence to have turned aside and fixed his teeth in a bye-stander. Yet so it was, and it struck me that the unmanly unprovoked attack not only warranted, but demanded, a remonstrance from the descendants of Doctor Bentley. I stood only in the second degree from my uncle Richard, and as much below him in controversial ability, as I was in lineal descent. I appealed therefore in the first place to him, as nearest in blood, and strongest in capacity. His blood however was not in the temper to ferment as mine did, and with a philosophical contempt for this sparring of pens

he positively declined having any thing to do with the affair. I well remember, but I won't describe the scene; he was very pleasant with me, and reminded me with great kindness how utterly unequal I ought to think myself for undertaking to hold an argument against Bishop Lowth. He was perfectly right; it was exactly so that a sensible Roman would have talked to Curtius before he took his foolish leap, or a charitable European to a Bramin widow before she devoted herself to the flames; but my obstinacy was incorrigible. At length having warned me that I was about to draw a complete discomfiture on my cause, he prudently conditioned with me so to mark myself out, either by name or description, in the title of my pamphlet, as that he should stand excused, and out of chance of being mistaken for its author. Nothing could be more reasonable, and I promised to comply with his injunctions, and be duly careful of his safety. This I fulfilled by describing myself under such a signature, as all but told my name, and could not possibly, as I conceived, be fathered upon him. With this he was content, and with great politeness, in which no man ex

ceeded him, gave me his hand at parting and wished me a good deliverance.

I lost no time in addressing myself to this task, it soon grew into the size of a pamphlet; my heart was warm in the subject, and as soon as my appeal appeared I was publicly known to be the author of it. I may venture to say, that weak as my bow was presumed to be, the arrow did not miss its aim, and justice universally decided for me. Warburton had candidly apologised to Lowth for having unknowingly hurt his feelings by some glances he had made at the person of a deceased relation of the Bishop of Oxford, and I now claimed from Lowth the same candour, which he had experienced in the apology of Warburton. This was unanswerable, and though Bishop Lowth would not condescend to offer the atonement to me, which he had exacted and received from another, still he had the grace to keep silence, and not attempt a justification of himself, and that, which he did not do per se, he would not permit to be done per alium ; for I have reason to know he refused the voluntary reply, tendered to him by a certain clergyman of his diocese, acknowledging that