WARBURTON, WILLIAM ( 6 _9_-1779), English critic and divine, bishop of Gloucester, was born at Newark Dec. 4, 1698, son of the town clerk of Newark. William was articled an attorney, left the law and in 1727 was ordained priest by the bishop of London. At Brant Broughton, Lincolnshire, of which parish he became incumbent in 1728, Warburton spent eighteen years in study, the first result of which was his treatise on the Alliance between Church and State (1736). The book IA-ought Warburton into favour at court, and he probably only missed immediate preferment by the death of Queen Caroline. His next and best-known work, Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (2 vols., , preserves his name as the author of a daring and ingenious theological paradox. The deists had made the absence of any inculcation of the doctrine of a future life an objection to the divine authority of the Mosaic writings. Warburton boldly admitted the fact and turned it against the adversary by maintaining that no merely human legislator would have omitted such a sanction of morality.
He now entered on a defence of Pope's Essay on Man against the Examen of Jean Pierre de Crousaz, in a series of articles (1738-1739) contributed to The Works of the Learned. These articles brought him the friendship of Pope, whom he persuaded to add a fourth book to the Dunciad, and encouraged to sub stitute Cibber for Theobald as the hero of the poem in the edition published under the editorship of Warburton. Pope be queathed him the copyright and the editorship of his works, and introduced him to Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, who ob tained for him in 1746 the preachership of Lincoln's Inn, and to Ralph Allen, who, says Johnson, "gave him his niece and his estate, and, by consequence, a bishopric." After his marriage Warburton resided principally at his father-in-law's estate at Prior Park, Gloucestershire, which he inherited on Allen's death in In 1747 appeared his edition of Shakespeare, into which, as he expressed it, Pope's earlier edition was melted down. He had previously entrusted notes and emendations on Shakespeare to Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose unauthorized use of them led to a heated controversy. As early as 1727 Warburton had corre
sponded with Theobald on Shakespearean subjects. He now accused him of stealing his ideas and denied his critical ability. Theobald's superiority to Warburton as a Shakespearean critic has long since been acknowledged. Warburton was further kept busy by the attacks on his Divine Legation from all quarters, by a dispute with Bolingbroke respecting Pope's behaviour in the affair of Bolingbroke's Patriot King, by his edition of Pope's works (1750 and by a vindication in 1750 of the alleged miracu lous interruption of the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem undertaken by Julian, in answer to Conyers Middleton. War burton's manner of dealing with opponents was both insolent and rancorous, but it did him no disservice. He became prebendary of Gloucester (1753), chaplain to the king (1754), prebendary of Durham (1755), dean of Bristol (1757) and in 1759 bishop of Gloucester. He toiled to complete the Divine Legation but failed. He wrote a defence of revealed religion in his View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy and Hume's Natural History of Religion called forth some Remarks . . . "by a gentleman of Cambridge" from Warburton, in which his friend and biographer, Richard Hurd, had a share (1757). He made in 1762 a vigorous attack on Methodism under the title of The Doctrine of Grace. He died at Gloucester on June 7, 1779.
Warburton's works were edited (7 vols., 1788) by Bishop Hurd with a biographical preface, and the correspondence between the two friends—an important contribution to the literary history of the period —was edited by Dr. Parr in 18o8. Warburton's life was also written by John Selby Watson in 1863, and Mark Pattison made him the subject of an essay in 5889. See also I. D'Israeli, Quarrels of Authors (1814) ; and especially John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes (1812-15), vol. v., and Illustrations (1817-58), vol. ii., for his correspondence with William Stukeley, Peter des Maizeaux, Thomas Birch, John Jortin and Lewis Theobald.