University of Virginia Library

William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester (1698-1779), and David Dalrymple, 3rd Bart. Lord Hailes (1726-92), carried on a lengthy correspondence from 1762 to 1776 touching on antiquarian, bibliographical, historical, legal and philological matters. The letters have in recent years become accessible to scholars through the acquisition of the New Hailes collection by the National Library of Scotland.[1] Unfortunately, only one side of this correspondence—Warburton's—is known to survive. Warburton's scarcely noted interest in Scottish life, literature and culture is made abundant here. His letters pass comment on subjects as diverse as James Beattie and the Edinburgh professoriat, the Berean sect, copyright litigation, the Douglas cause, the Foulis press, the origin of words like 'Pipowers' and 'sallet,' and various printing specimens for Dalrymple's books.

In 1762 Warburton was in his mid-sixties, although his literary disputes were not yet over. Warburton had risen to the height of his clerical career with his consecration as Bishop of Gloucester in 1760. His series of seven letters in The History of the Works of the Learned in 1738 defending Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man from the attacks of the Swiss theologian Jean Pierre de Crousaz had brought him into the poet's influential sphere in the

early 1740s. Through Pope, Warburton met the Prior Park benefactor, Ralph Allen, whose niece, Gertrude Tucker, Warburton married in 1746. Warburton's editions of Shakespeare (1747) and Pope (1751) were widely attacked. In the 1750s, Warburton had been embroiled in the controversies surrounding deism and naturalism expounded by Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and David Hume. Shortly after his correspondence with Dalrymple commenced, Warburton was ridiculed by John Wilkes in the obscene parody, An Essay on Woman, which rocked the House of Lords on 15 November 1763; but this scandal was soon overshadowed by the furor over number 45 of Wilkes' North Briton, which was declared a seditious libel against George III by the House of Commons.

Twenty-eight years Warburton's junior, Dalrymple had been admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1748. Dalrymple was raised to the Bench as Lord Hailes in 1766 and appointed a Lord of the Justiciary in 1776.[2] This eminent Scottish biographer, historian, judge and editor sent Warburton a copy of Memorials and Letters Relating to the History of Britain in the Reign of James I in the spring of 1762. On the same date as his first known letter to Dalrymple, Warburton sent the following note to the London bookseller Thomas Becket which suggests that Dalrymple was a stranger to him: 'I beg you would direct the inclosed to Mr Dalrimple who it seems is now Sr David Dalrimple. but as I neither know his titles nor address, I have left the direction to you and have franked it, because I suppose it is to go by the post' (Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Gratz Collection). Warburton's enclosure was very likely his first letter below.[3] Becket may well have brought the correspondents together: he published Sir John Dalrymple's The Appeal to Reason to the People of England, on the Present State of Parties in the Nation in 1763. On the other hand, the Edinburgh-born London bookseller Andrew Millar may have provided the link: Millar published both Warburton's and Pope's works from 1755 to 1769 as well as John Dalrymple's popular An Essay towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain, which ran to four editions from 1757 to 1759.

David Dalrymple sought Warburton's advice on the publication of An Account of the Preservation of King Charles II, with his Letters (1766), Memorials and Letters Relating to the History of Britain in the Reign of Charles I (1766) and Annals of Scotland from Malcolm Canmore to Robert I (1776). Warburton and Dalrymple shared passionate interests in antiquarian and contemporary books. With Dalrymple, Warburton felt he could let loose his collar and be on familiar terms, although they did not always see eye to eye: in 1774, Dalrymple and Warburton evidently took opposing sides in the great literary property debate. Warburton, who as the main copyright-holder of Pope's works had a strong financial incentive for preserving monopolies, put forward his case in the anonymous 1747 pamphlet, A Letter from an Author to a Member of Parliament concerning Literary Property. Dalrymple inclined towards the prevailing view that monopolies held by small groups of mainly London-based booksellers were untenable. In the arguments over the case of Hinton v. Donaldson (the result of which led Donaldson to victory in the precedent-setting case against Becket in the House of Lords), The Decision of the Court of Session, Upon the Question of Literary Property, compiled by James Boswell (Edinburgh: Printed by James Donaldson, for Alexander Donaldson, 1774), Dalrymple referred to his correspondent in defense of Donaldson: 'in the opinion of The Sages in St. Paul's Church Yard, Stackhouse is no less an original author than Hooker or Warburton' (p. 8).

Unfortunately, Warburton did not live long enough to see Dalrymple's Disquisitions concerning the Antiquities of the Christian Church (1783). Warburton's last known letter to Dalrymple, dated 29 February 1776, acknowledged his receipt of a volume of the Annals of Scotland and 'an elegant edition of Languet's Epistles'. His only son, named after Ralph Allen, died of consumption in 1775, and Warburton, who never completely recovered from the shock, died on 7 June 1779. Almost a year after the bishop's death, Warburton's widow drew up a list of his manuscripts for Richard Hurd, his literary executor and editor. Bishop Hurd, translated to Worcester in 1781, acquired Warburton's collection for his new library in Hartlebury Castle; Pope's library had been more or less re-united when Warburton inherited Ralph Allen's library in 1764. On 3 May 1780, Gertrude Warburton sent Hurd a letter along with her inventory from Prior Park, which might explain what happened to the letters Dalrymple sent to Warburton:

Under the heading 'Letters to the Bishop', she included 'Ld. Mansfield 2 or 3 dozen', but all that appears under Warburton's other surviving Scottish correspondent is: 'Dalrymple, relating to his Work, the Annals of Scotland'. Pope's old friend and Warburton's legal adviser, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, whose library was destroyed in the Gordon Riots of June 1780, died in 1793. The extent of Warburton's burning of his own manuscripts is unknown, as is any subsequent destruction. None of the papers listed in Gertrude Warburton's inventory is known to survive at Prior Park or Hartlebury Castle. According to Robert M. Ryley, approximately one thousand letters to and from Warburton survive (William Warburton, 1984, p. 91). Warburton may have inadvertently lost or destroyed his letters from Dalrymple.

Notes: The following twenty-six letters have been transcribed as closely as modern fonts will allow. Warburton's use of capitals, superscribed letters, punctuation, paragraph indents and spelling have all been preserved. Where deletions are still legible, they have been given as strike-throughs. Suffixes denoting ordinal numbers generally appear as a swirl which I have rendered as a small circumflex. I have silently corrected "it's" where "its" is appropriate, but have preserved spelling idiosyncrasies (e.g. "knowlege" and "acknowlege"). Square brackets are used for editorial insertions; carets denote Warburton's interpolations. Two letters, both sent from Gloucester, dated 7 May and 20 June 1774 (old reference number: Acc. 7228/18, ff.167-168 and 169-170) have gone missing, presumed stolen, between the editor's cataloguing and transcribing of this correspondence. For further light on Warburton's papers and controversies, see Pope's Literary Legacy: the Book-Trade Correspondence of William Warburton and John Knapton with other letters and related documents (1744-1780), ed. Donald W. Nichol (Oxford Bibliographical Society, ns XXIII, 1992). The following short forms have been adopted:

• Gaskell Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press, 2nd ed., Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1986
• G.S. [in letters] Grosvenor Square, London
• NLS National Library of Scotland
• P.P. Prior Park