SOURCE: Fairer, David. Introduction to The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, edited by David Fairer, pp. xvii-xxxvi. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Fairer describes Warton's importance as a literary figure.]

On the evening of 20 March 1776 Dr. Johnson and Boswell, who were on a visit to Oxford together, went round to Trinity College to call on Johnson's friend of over twenty years' standing, Thomas Warton: “We went to Mr. Thomas Warton of Trinity, whom I had long wished to see. We found him in a very elegant apartment ornamented with good prints, and with wax or spermaceti candles before him. All this surprised me, because I had heard that Tom kept low drunken company, and I expected to see a confused dusty room and a little, fat, laughing fellow. In place of which I found a good, sizable man, with most decent clothes and darkish periwig, one who might figure as a canon.”¹ Caught between expectation and reality, Boswell finds Warton hard to pin down. The confused dusty room is obviously the place where The History of English Poetry was written; the little, fat, laughing fellow is Tom Warton of The Oxford Sausage; but instead Boswell seems to have found, in his elegant apartment, Professor Warton, the editor of Theocritus.

Warton's literary achievement was certainly many-sided: poet, literary historian, classical scholar, Gothic enthusiast, humorist, biographer, editor. He was a man in whom so many strands of the cultural life of the eighteenth century met. He represented, too, something of the capaciousness of the “literary” in an age when it subsumed classical studies and historical research and scholarship generally, before the post-romantic contraction of literature within confined notions of creativity. It is important to recognize that in his wide range of works Warton was addressing one public. His edition of Latin inscriptions was received as eagerly as a new volume of the History, Professor Dalzel of Edinburgh used Theocritus and Newmarket: A Satire in the same lesson, and Gibbon owned not only the History but the Life of Bathurst too.² It is perhaps inevitable that such a widely based achievement should fragment once this omnivorous readership declined.

If modern criticism cannot reinstate Warton to his former greatness, it can at least recognize what René Wellek has called his “immense historical importance”³ and attempt to appreciate him as the eighteenth century did, by viewing him as a whole. An edition of his correspondence will perhaps encourage this by showing him at work not just on The History of English Poetry but on many of his less familiar works. By bringing Thomas Warton into sharper focus among his friends and contemporaries it may be possible to renew critical interest in a significant feature of the eighteenth-century literary landscape, and to understand how it was possible for Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (by no means an uncritical admirer of Warton's work) to say of him in 1800: “Perhaps there was no one, by whose death the literature of England could have sustained a greater chasm.”⁴

At the time of his death in 1790 as Poet Laureate and Camden Professor of History at Oxford, Warton was at the head of his profession and occupied a unique and somewhat contradictory place in the nation's affections. On the one hand he represented the nostalgic spirit of the old antiquarians, bookish and devoted to curious inquiry, and yet, far from being an out-of-touch figure from a previous age, he was in his later years surrounded by a band of admiring young poets who were speaking and developing his own poetic voice and placing it at the forefront of literary tastes. Henry Headley, Thomas Russell, and William Lisle Bowles (to name only three) were Wartonians steeped in the spirit of their mentor, and the poetry produced during the 1790s by Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth was rooted in the work of Warton and his followers. In 1825, casting his eye backwards, Robert Southey wrote of the poetic scene: “If any man may be called the father of the present race, it is Thomas Warton,” and he spoke of the School of Warton as “the true English school.”⁵

Warton's greatest achievement, The History of English Poetry, was similarly both retrospective and a generator of new literary trends. What the neo-Gothic Horace Walpole had regarded as an inelegant trudge through “the muddy poetry of three or four centuries that had never a poet,”⁶ Sir Walter Scott was to welcome in 1804 as an “immense common-place-book,” a mine “inexhaustible in its treasures” which Warton had recovered and fed into the literary consciousness of his country.⁷ It would be an exaggeration to say that Warton gave Britain its literary past, but none at all to argue that he helped shape the nation's awareness of it. To a great storyteller like Scott the Wartonian narrative was too crowded with incident and too unsorted to be a satisfactory history, and so his response to it was that of a poet finding a hoard of precious source materials “from the perusal of which we rise, our fancy delighted with beautiful imagery, and with the happy analysis of ancient tale and song.”

The significance of Warton's History for the next generation lay also in what it was not. In the 1770s, when some in the literary establishment were looking for a classical work of polite learning in which literary history was regulated into periods and schools, Warton rejected the taxonomic patterns of Pope and Gray.⁸ Where some might have expected the narrative to be one of incremental improvement culminating in the elegance and correctness of the Restoration period, 1660-88, Warton's story sets this in tension with another movement—a retrospect, which is continually reaching back through its footnotes and digressions to a world that has been lost, to old customs and images that fascinated Warton the antiquarian. During its writing the History began turning round on itself, pursuing the retrospect rather than the official pattern of improvement and progress.

The key to what is only an apparent contradiction lies in the notion of the recovery of the past, a process of literary archaeology, or unlayering, in which personal conviction combined with a deep knowledge of the remains of former ages in an attempt to locate and reanimate hidden sources of poetic inspiration. This aim set Warton at variance with his great contemporary, Dr. Johnson. Their principles of literary value were opposed and their canons incompatible, and some of the complexity of the intellectual scene during the second half of the eighteenth century is lost if the dubious term “the Age of Johnson” is allowed to conceal the fact that the Wartonian pattern of literary history was in the ascendant.

From 1750, when he began reading in the Bodleian Library, Warton steeped himself in the literature of the medieval and Renaissance past, and he established a kind of native line of descent, working back through the early Milton to his beloved Spenser, and back through him to the world of Malory, Chaucer, and the medieval romances of chivalry. Warton's three important works of literary history, Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754), The History of English Poetry (1774-81), and the edition of Milton's minor poems (1785), are part of a single enterprise to establish and explore the root system of the native verse tradition. The age, 1660-1740, which for Johnson had seen the culmination of literary achievement, was for Warton an interlude, an elegant and artificial interruption into the continuum that was English poetry. Where Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81) placed Pope's Homer as the climax of his story and considered that any attempts at improving on Pope's versification would be “dangerous,”⁹ the Wartonian reversal involved the demotion of Pope to the secondary branch of didactic rather than imaginative poetry. In this way Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope (1756, 1782) had its part to play in the Wartonian project.¹⁰ Johnson's Lives can be seen to have been directed at the literary tastes and principles represented by the Warton brothers: if Johnson wished to establish 1660-1740 as the great age of English poetry, he had to demote the work of the early Milton at one end and that of Gray and the poetry of “Sensibility” at the other. But the Lives could not of course engage directly with the Wartons' work. In conversation Johnson mocked, only half jokingly, the “Ode and Elegy and Sonnet” of Thomas's 1777 volume (a text that was to have a marked influence on the direction poetry took during the next generation), not knowing that he was quoting what would be the subtitle of Southey's first collection of verse.¹¹ To the degree that Johnson's Lives of the Poets attempted to correct and divert the literary developments of his day, the period 1740-90 was, if anything, more truly the Age of Warton than the Age of Johnson. It is this fact that makes the reinstatement of Warton as a significant literary figure a useful counterweight to the “Augustan Pantheon” view of the eighteenth century.

The future Laureate was born on 9 January 1728 in the small market town of Basingstoke, Hampshire, where his father was Vicar and Headmaster of the local grammar school. Thomas Warton the Elder had moved there from Oxford where he had been fellow of Magdalen College, and in that same year he was ending his tenure as the University's Professor of Poetry. Unlike his elder brother Joseph, who was sent to Winchester College, Thomas remained at home in Basingstoke under his father's care, and from him he picked up a thorough knowledge of the classical languages, a fascination for antiquity, a tinge of Jacobitism, and the habit of writing verse.

Between his entering Trinity College Oxford as a sixteen-year-old in 1744 and his appointment to a fellowship there in 1752, Warton's poetic output was considerable. He published six volumes of verse, the most influential of which was “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” written at the age of seventeen and published by Dodsley in 1747.¹² Warton's world of solitude, darkness, and eerie suggestion, now and again broken by glimpses of a contrasting scene of glitter and artifice, became part of the poetic currency of the age. By 1750 he had also become known in the literary world as the University's poetic champion: his Triumph of Isis, written in response to William Mason's attack on the University's morals and patriotism, routed the opposition and celebrated Oxford in terms that inaugurated its myth of dreaming spires and unfashionable ideals.

In many early twentieth-century narratives of literary history “the Wartons” were given a strategic role as “pioneers of romanticism,”¹³ and certainly in the mid-1740s Thomas and his brother Joseph regarded themselves as part of a movement to change public taste and reinstate vision and imagination as the primary poetic qualities. Joseph's words in the advertisement to his Odes of 1746 (“the following Odes may be look'd upon as an attempt to bring back Poetry into its right channel”) were in fact anticipated by Thomas's draft preface to Five Pastoral Eclogues, 1745 (“The taste of Poetry in England begins to amend …”), and by his sketch for “An Essay on Romantic Poetry” dateable to the same year (“Several modern authors have employed a manner of poetry … which perhaps it would not be improper to call a Romantic Kind of Poetry, as it is altogether conceived in the spirit … & affects the Imagination in the same Manner, with the old Romances”).¹⁴ The letters between the brothers during these early years breathe the excitement of two young men reveling in being at the forefront of poetic trends. We are given tantalizing glimpses of some of their projects, especially Joseph's, and the correspondence conveys an infectious enthusiasm for the literary scene.

When Thomas Warton the Elder died leaving some worrying debts and a collection of unpublished verse, it seemed natural enough that the brothers should publish a subscription volume of their father's poetry. Poems on Several Occasions. By the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, when it appeared in 1748, was a landmark in literary taste, but it was so because his sons secretly contributed at least nineteen poems of their own.¹⁵ The precedent for such family “co-operation” had been set two years earlier when Thomas anonymously contributed two odes to Joseph's 1746 collection.¹⁶

We are fortunate in having forty-nine letters between the two brothers, more than enough to convey a sense of their lifelong devotion to each other, but the gaps are considerable (there is nothing surviving from the 1770s, for example) and so we shall probably never know how extensive their collaboration may have been. The existing letters, however, give an interesting picture of the two men exchanging hints and guidance on each other's work. Joseph advises Thomas on the structure of The Triumph of Isis, suggests an outline for an important sermon his brother is about to preach, or boasts about a fine new couplet for his Ode to Fancy,¹⁷ while Thomas sends “Ode to a Gentleman” to be included in his brother's 1746 Odes, helps out with the “Z” papers of The Adventurer, and oversees the printing of Joseph's Essay on Pope, attempting to bring some shape to material that was being written while the presses were running.¹⁸ Two significant survivals from 1786¹⁹ reveal that Thomas submitted his laureate odes in draft form to his brother for correction and improvement, and the New Year Ode for 1787 clearly benefited from Joseph's mastery of the well-turned phrase. In literary history “The Wartons” have often been treated as a single phenomenon and their correspondence confirms their closeness, but it also highlights their respective characters, which were as distinctive as their handwriting. Joseph's hand became increasingly flowing and rapid, full of breathless dashes, while Thomas's was ever more crabbed, scratchy, and laconic. Joseph's role as Headmaster of Winchester and head of a large and extended family contrasts with Thomas's bachelor life in his Oxford college. Where Joseph unfailingly charmed the ladies, Thomas was awkward in polite company and preferred to unwind among the boys of his brother's school, or in the company of soldiers and sailors or the tavern wits.²⁰ In their work, too, the emphases are differently placed: the sensational primitivism in The Enthusiast (1744) is as characteristic of Joseph as the melancholy nostalgia in “Ode Written at Vale-Royal Abbey” is of Thomas. Where Joseph's Essay on Pope shows its author's mastery of the latest French theories and, though a corrective, is essentially an engagement with current tastes,²¹ Thomas's Observations on the Faerie Queene is an act of scholarly archaeology, the fruit of his historical researches in the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum.

Before he entered Trinity in 1744, his maternal grandfather, Joseph Richardson, gave him his copy of the 1617 folio of Spenser's works²² and this volume proved a catalyst for the young man's reading. The margins of the book became crowded with annotations for what was being planned as an edition of Spenser but instead grew into the Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754), whose capacious format allowed him to use a lot of analogical material that had developed from footnotes into miniature essays. Working in the Oxford libraries, Warton soon discovered a wealth of older literature. It has been calculated from the Bodleian's records that in 1753 alone roughly one ninth of all orders for books and manuscripts were made by him, most being collections of older English literature and especially Elizabethan poetry and medieval romances.²³ His discovery of the 1634 edition of Malory (which he began reading on 7 May 1753) was a breakthrough and revealed how much Spenser had drawn from a stock of older romance motifs and episodes from the Arthurian story.

This aspect of the Observations was of particular interest to Thomas Percy, who was able to supply Warton with material for the expanded second edition (1762), and at the same time enlist his new friend's help in gathering material from the Oxford libraries for the Reliques and his editions of Buckingham and Surrey. Their correspondence during the 1760s is an absorbing example of the opportunities and difficulties that confronted the eighteenth-century literary scholar. But Percy's aims and principles were quite distinct from Warton's. Where Percy worked to accommodate his ballad material to the present by a kind of gentrification that adapted the past to the polite sensibilities of his own age, Warton's material somehow always resisted accommodation, and in spite of his occasional gestures towards smoothness and elegance, it is usually the curious or exotic that stirs his interest. The voluminous double-columned footnotes in the History have an effect equivalent to opening long-closed secret drawers and peering in at their slightly musty contents.

Observations on the Faerie Queene marked a change in literary history towards a more relativist, source-based approach that saw literature in organic terms as developing from a common stock of poetic language. Warton's innovation in this field was something for which Samuel Johnson was ready to give generous praise, and letter 25 inaugurated a warm friendship between the Rambler and the young Oxford don. In the letters of 1754-55, as M.A. of Oxford and author of the great Dictionary, Johnson grows conscious of being accepted into an academic community, and we see him attempting a range of literary reference that he sometimes has difficulty in getting right. By 1757 the relationship shows signs of strain, and Johnson's remark, “Professors forget their Friends,”²⁴ suggests he was feeling a little distanced from the successful young man.

Warton's election to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in 1756 brought a shift in his career towards official university duties and an increasing commitment to classical literature. The ancient writers could never be far from the mind of any Oxford tutor, but the discipline of lecturing four times a year over a decade on the poetry of the Greeks allowed him to range through the topics of epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, epigram, didactic, and pastoral verse, and something of the Greek spirit began to find its way into his own poetry, as several later critics noticed.²⁵ But it would be wrong to see this as a deviation from his other literary studies. On the contrary, the same principle drove him: the uncovering of purer sources of literary inspiration. This was partly why he chose Ancient Greek literature, and why the fundamental principle he repeatedly stressed was that of simplicity. This had been the subject of a projected “Essay on the Simplicity of the Ancients” (dated 28 February 1745) and of a brief advertisement prefixed to the “Three Epigrams Translated from the Greek” in his father's 1748 Poems (the translations were probably also by him). In praising Warton's 1758 collection of classical and modern Latin inscriptions, James “Hermes” Harris must have delighted his correspondent by differentiating his Athenian good taste from “that phantom bearing its name, imported by Petit Maitres from France.”²⁶ The aims of Warton's youthful campaign (for so it must be called) were the re-establishing in English poetry of both the native tradition and the principles of true Greek classicism. Each could give modern poetry a new immediacy, whether through simplicity of style or a direct appeal to the imagination. It is important for an understanding of Warton's character and works to see that he was able, from his early years, to bring these two traditions into some sort of reconciliation. In the History Warton can define and appreciate the classical qualities in the poetry of Lord Surrey (the smoothness of his verse, the elegance of his transitions, the balance of thought and feeling) while at the same time appreciating the imaginative qualities of less polished Tudor poetry. Warton's love of classical literature widened his sympathies as a critic and also affected his poetry. An interesting text in this regard is his translation of the famous “Dirge for Bion,” which occupied twelve pages of his father's Poems and shows the young man's skill in assimilating the language of the original Greek into the tones of Spenser and the early Milton.

Warton's attitude to the classics is intimately related to the principles behind his English literary history, and one significant feature of his correspondence is that it serves to remind us of Warton the classical scholar. We see him acting officially as a Delegate of the Clarendon Press, negotiating with Samuel Musgrave for the Oxford Euripides, and most fascinatingly we view him at work on all stages of his major project, the two-volume Theocritus (1770). The correspondence with Jonathan Toup is notable in that it was the latter's contributions to Warton's work that gave the edition a degree of scholarly importance. Warton's priorities were not textual (the text of the idylls had in fact been printed off in 1758, the year the contract was signed), whereas Toup's contributions to the textual study of Theocritus remain significant to this day, and Warton perhaps recognized that diplomatic handling of the prickly Cornish clergyman would pay dividends. During the period of their correspondence we can see Toup's Appendicula take shape as we follow the “magnific” edition through to the dilemma of its dedication and the drama of its publication, when a storm blew up around Warton's head and Toup finally lost his equilibrium. The scandal of the “obscene” note drew in those other battle-hardened adversaries, Lowth and Warburton, to the embarrassment of Warton, who wanted to remain on good terms with both. The affair made considerable demands on his tact and his usually irrepressible good humor.

Fortunately the correspondence offers some characteristic glimpses of that aspect of Warton which delighted many of his contemporaries—and unsettled a few. The Warton of The Oxford Sausage (1764)²⁷ occasionally shows through to remind the reader that the good-natured humorist never lies far beneath the surface of his work. Warton's popular anthology of Oxford verse was designed as a burlesque work of “Taste,” whose ingredients were “highly seasoned … carefully selected and happily blended,” and it exemplifies the spirit of Oxford “waggery” that was a feature of the University's literary life.²⁸

Boswell's sketch, quoted at the beginning of this introduction, places Warton within a set of contradictory terms: the elegant and the low, order and confusion, sobriety and drunkenness, solemnity and laughter, even the “sizable” and the “little.” It is the material out of which the eighteenth century fashioned the burlesque, or shaped the antitheses of the heroic couplet, and such contradictions are at the heart of Warton's character and literary output. But in him they coexist amicably rather than work against each other. Boswell's diary entry does not banish the Warton of his expectations, but keeps it hovering in sight as a ghostly twin, and there is a similar unkempt and laughing presence haunting the Warton correspondence.

To put it in more formal terms, Warton's social range was considerable. The Poet Laureate at the Court of George III, whose sphere was aristocratic house parties, private theatricals at Blenheim, and foxhunting with the Duke of Beaufort,²⁹ was as likely to be found in Captain Jolly's Tavern, where porter was fourpence a quart and Ben Tyrrell's mutton pies could be had for threepence. The University Professor was a stalwart of the Jelly-Bag Society, a group who would meet for drink and puns at secret venues in Oxford.³⁰ Warton's humorous poems, some contributed anonymously to Jackson's Oxford Journal and The Student (1750-51), were generously represented in Warton's anthology, The Union (as by “A Gentleman formerly of the University of Aberdeen”), and later in the Sausage. His best-known comic poem, “The Progress of Discontent,” was quoted back at him by Johnson in letter 37, and one of its couplets came into Lord Byron's mind as he sailed away from England in 1811.³¹ “A Panegyric on Oxford Ale,” “Ode to a Grizzle Wig,” and “Prologue on the Old Winchester Playhouse, Over the Butcher's Shambles” all have a verbal relish that interweaves mock pomposity and lyric fancy until the two tones fuse. The effect is subtle, as innocence and experience meet in a humorous nostalgia.³²

A similarly complex tone characterizes A Companion to the Guide, and a Guide to the Companion (1760). This prose pamphlet, with a title suggested by Ovid, is both a burlesque upon, and supplement to, the official Oxford Guide. It provides a tour of neglected places of interest such as the tennis courts, the racetracks, and the unofficial University Libraries run by coffee-house proprietors. But the pamphlet is at the same time the work of Warton the antiquarian. He describes with affectionate detail the old pillory in the Cornmarket, the down-and-outs' bench beneath Carfax clock-tower, and the two-faced pump in the High Street. He records amusing epitaphs, gives a woodcut of the Carfax clock, and in discussing the Boar's Head Ceremony at Queen's he prints the original carol from the unique Bodleian fragment. The message is that conveyed by one of the grotesque figures overlooking Magdalen College cloisters, which is “significantly situated … to admonish strangers, and particularly the Young Student, that Science is not inconsistent with Good-Humour, and that Scholars are a merrier Sett of People than the World is apt to imagine.”³³

Letter 166, which Warton sent anonymously to Jackson's Oxford Journal, has the same combination of good-humored satire and a genuine fondness for Oxford's old buildings, and it adds significantly to our appreciation of Warton's architectural interests and his uneasiness with contemporary elegance. Beneath the playful humor can be glimpsed a genuine distaste for the process of modernization that was spoiling the character of his beloved medieval city.

From 1744 until the moment of his death (sitting in his chair in the common room while enjoying a convivial evening with friends) Trinity College Oxford was the center of Warton's life. Unrewarded by any substantial college benefice and overlooked for its Presidency, he nevertheless served it faithfully for forty years. He gave much time to the troublesome rotation of college offices during his years of writing the History,³⁴ and an awareness of his college duties can only increase our respect for a life characterized throughout by a fund of physical and mental energy. The official side of his college duties has been happily preserved in a group of letters exchanged, in his role as Bursar, with Lord Guilford, the college's most important tenant. These, along with records among the Trinity Archives of audits and college visitations, confirm that Warton's amusing contribution to Johnson's Idler (no. 33, 2 December 1758), the “Journal of a Senior Fellow,” is a young man's benign laughter at a lazy old don, and neither a portrait nor a prophecy of Warton's own daily routine.

Warton's fascination for sources and foundations shows through in the fact that he traced the origins of each institution with which he was connected. Here again it is evident that his work in literary history is intimately bound up with his other concerns. Winchester, the place where he spent most vacations in the company of Joseph's family and the boys of the school, was the subject of his historical guidebook, A Description of the City, College and Cathedral of Winchester (1760), and he prepared for the press an edition of Wykeham's Roll, a venerable manuscript of the household expenses of the college's founder that he had come across in the muniment room.³⁵ When Warton was given the Rectory of Kiddington by the Chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Lichfield, he inevitably began working on the history of the parish, published in 1781 as Specimen of a Parochial History of Oxfordshire. Above all, Trinity College was the focus of Warton's passion for a kind of localized history that could work back to the past through his own experience and strengthen a relationship by recovering its sources and influences. His Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst (1761) took as its subject Trinity's greatest President who had built its reputation and its chapel, and the Life of Sir Thomas Pope (1772) traced not merely the life of the college's founder but gathered into a lengthy appendix many interesting historical documents, one of which found its way to him from a helpful clergyman.³⁶ The correspondence can help fill out our view of Warton's scholarly studies by showing him at work on these less familiar achievements that helped build up his reputation as a historian.

Warton in fact came very near to being appointed Oxford's Regius Professor of History. The story during the years 1768-71 of his oft-kindled hopes and ultimate failure is an absorbing one.³⁷ Where Warton had failed to enlist either Horace Walpole or Bishop Shipley to his cause,³⁸ the doughty William Warburton strode into battle on his behalf. Not merely do the bishop's letters reveal Warton's attitudes and tactics in his bid for office, but they also convey a sharply drawn picture of Warburton himself, who saw in his younger friend a standard-bearer for integrity and merit amid the encroaching gloom of an age of place-fixing and moral compromise. Warburton's often moving letters show him recapturing a Popean ethical fervor, especially in letter 263 when he quotes with feeling from the apocalyptic close of The Dunciad as though he were wishing his own former friend and patron back to life. Warton's failure to become Regius Professor may have confirmed his patron's views of a corrupt age, but it is clear that bad luck and Warton's own eventual diffidence also played a part. In 1785, however, the university recognized his achievements in the historical field by making him its Camden Professor.

Historical researches were Warton's great love, which becomes abundantly clear from the correspondence. Many letters in this volume are concerned with antiquarian matters, and his works in literary history, as well as the historical cast of much of his poetry, are here given their context in Warton's concern for the retrieval of the past. We see him attributing a coat of arms in a painting in Winchester Cathedral and conjecturing about the date of the Salisbury spire in a letter that found its way into the local guidebook.³⁹ He identifies a coin found during an excavation, offers his interpretation of the reliefs on the Winchester font, and explains an unusual gesture in a stained-glass window.⁴⁰ He is always ready to inspect and report on the state of historic buildings: the Hospital of St. John Baptist at Basingstoke, Sir Thomas Pope's wainscot at Luton Hoo, or the remains of Titchfield House associated with the Earls of Southampton.⁴¹ Warton appears never happier than when engaged in the retrieval and preservation of the past. In 1865 Henry Boyle Lee (Warton's great-nephew) drew on family papers and locally preserved anecdotes to draw a vivid picture of Warton exploring architectural antiquities:

On such occasions Warton was in all his glory; and, whether alone or in company, he was equally busy and delighted. Note-book in hand, he would mark, and measure, and speculate, and admire; or, if an audience should improvise itself around him, then would he, like Captain Clutterbuck, “expatiate to their astonished minds upon crypts, and chancels, and naves, Gothic and Saxon architectures, mullions, and flying buttresses.” In this way he passed the summer vacations during many years of his life; storing up facts, searching out records, consulting authorities, and noting references, all with the ultimate view of producing a complete and systematic work on the subject of Gothic architecture, the study of which he pursued up to the time of his death with a love which admitted of no engrossing rivalry, except in that which he bore to his brother and sister, his writing-desk, his old books, and his old college ale.⁴²

Lee also describes, through the recollections of Warton's niece, probably his own mother, Harriet Lee (1775-1863), examples of his intervening to save remnants of medieval craftsmanship: “[She] could well remember having witnessed, in her early days, her uncle's self-congratulations on the subject of his efforts in that direction. He would relate with glee how often he had stopped some pursy vicar riding with his wife stuck behind him …, and how he had scolded, and argued, and almost shed tears, rather than fail to enlist their sympathies in favour of some tomb or niche, which he had heard of as being doomed to destruction.” Warton's delight in the Gothic was no mere aesthetic preference, but a zealous commitment to preserving the monuments of former ages. All Warton's works were the result of his passion for the past; the poems on Stonehenge, the Crusades, and King Arthur's Round Table, and the nostalgic descriptions of loved scenes left or revisited are two poetic aspects of the impulse that filled the footnotes of the History with wardrobe-lists and records of forgotten customs.

Warton gained a national reputation as an expert on Gothic architecture from a fourteen-page account added for the second edition of Observations on the Fairy Queen.⁴³ This example of Wartonian digression (offered as a note on the “stately pillours” of Venus's temple in book 4, canto 10) was praised by Horace Walpole as the first successful attempt to distinguish the successive periods of Gothic,⁴⁴ and it was being reprinted as a separate essay into the nineteenth century.⁴⁵ Each style is characterized and discussed; dated examples from specific churches are presented from Warton's own observations, supported by ecclesiastical records and evidence from the seals of medieval monarchs. The scholarly world waited in vain for the advertised History of Gothic Architecture in England. After Warton's death John Price possessed the manuscript written out for the press, but this has disappeared.⁴⁶ However, the work for which it was to serve as a preface still survives at Winchester: Observations Critical and Historical, on Castles, Churches, Monasteries, and other Monuments of Antiquity in Various Parts of England. This work, containing dated accounts of some of the buildings he visited written out fairly into notebooks, was the fruit of Warton's summer rambles.

It is useful to be reminded that The History of English Poetry was the brain-child of a poet, classical scholar, humorist, historian, and Gothic enthusiast. The many sides of Warton's personality evident in his correspondence all have a bearing on the complex character of the History: the poet retrieved striking images and beautiful phrases from the obscurest texts; the classical scholar traced the spread of Greek and Latin learning into England and noted the virtues of smooth phrasing and elegant simplicity; the humorist could enliven the dullest catalog with an ironic smile; the historian traced literary influences through an intricate narrative of progress and deterioration, occasionally stepping back to characterize a period or take stock of his project; meanwhile, the Gothic enthusiast delighted in accumulating the bric-a-brac of the past to illustrate ancient customs and manners. The History is the sum of all these aspects of Warton's life and personality.

The magnum opus had germinated in Warton's mind as early as 1754, but it was the encouragement of Richard Hurd in 1762, reinforced by brother Joseph's enthusiastic support, that was decisive.⁴⁷ Warton had already done considerable research but was unsure of how to order his material, and in the early years he toyed with a number of projects. There was no precedent for a single unfolding narrative of English literary history. After a century of tentative efforts in the guise of anecdotes, catalogs, chronologies, and prefaces, it was Warton who first accepted the challenge of narrating the progress of English literature from the Norman Conquest. Before his work there prevailed even among scholars a surprising ignorance of medieval and early Tudor poetry, to an extent that is difficult for us now to appreciate. To take an example two years before the publication of Warton's first volume: William Barrett, the Bristol Antiquary, had commented to his friend Andrew Coltee Ducarel⁴⁸ that there was generally held to be no writer between Chaucer and Spenser entitled to the name of “poet.” The Keeper of the Lambeth Library replied: “who knows that? who hath particularly looked into this branch of literature? The world is indeed much obliged to the learned Dr. Percy for his Reliques of Antient Poetry. But is there nothing else left amongst us of that kind? have all the old MSS on that subject in the libraries of the two universities, in the Cotton, Harleian, &c. &c. been examined? The contrary is known to be true; and, till that is done, the question must remain undecided.”⁴⁹ This was the challenge that Warton took up, and he did so in a chronological, though digressive, narrative that encompassed not only poetry but also translation, prose, history, and drama. Clarissa Rinaker's bibliography of printed sources for the History gives a selected list of more than eight hundred titles (many of them foreign), which she admits to be about half the full figure.⁵⁰ Warton also used some seven hundred manuscripts, printing for the first time the important lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253, many extracts from romances, the Bodleian Vernon manuscript, John Gower's Balades, and The Kingis Quair of James I of Scotland.⁵¹ He also gave the first full discussion of the origins of the English drama, the first critical survey of the Scottish Chaucerians, Gower, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, and Stephen Hawes, as well as many selections from the minor poetry of the sixteenth century. Ducarel's letter could not have been written after 1774.

In pursuing his task Warton explored numerous libraries in colleges, museums, cathedrals, and private houses, and he was fortunate in the number of catalogs available to help him—the dedicated work of Ames, Tanner, Wanley, and others. But his greatest advantage was the proximity of the Bodleian Library, just across Broad Street from Trinity College, and he was also fortunate in having as his close friend Bodley's Librarian, John Price, who was a valuable man to know during the years when the History was taking shape. When the library was closed Price would admit Warton “behind the scenes,”⁵² and while he was away in Winchester Price kept him in touch with the library by dispatching information by post.⁵³ Practical help was also forthcoming from other friends: David Garrick generously loaned two volumes of metrical romances and several old plays from his collection.⁵⁴ Less helpfully perhaps, Warton was also the recipient of a friend's theories: the well-intentioned Hans Stanley thought he had discovered a Greek source for Boccaccio's Teseida and bombarded him with his proofs. But Warton's early skepticism proved justified and Stanley eventually had to concede that his poem was in fact a Greek translation of the Italian.⁵⁵

Such were in these early years the perils of literary history, when error and confusion hovered behind every confident statement, and new facts lurked somewhere to disprove any too hasty conclusion. In October 1782 Warton became a notable victim of a scholarly castigator with the publication of Joseph Ritson's Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry. Besides gleefully pointing out errors in the History, Ritson made a vicious personal attack on the author's character and scholarly credentials. Warton had many eloquent defenders in the magazines, but one of the most effective replies was actually by Warton himself, signed “Verax” and sent to Nichols for publication in the Gentleman's Magazine.⁵⁶

Certainly Warton fell below modern standards of accuracy and his work is at times rambling, but his adversary could choose his ground and it was not difficult to spotlight specific errors among the 1,765 pages of the History. Like a Blakean Devourer, Ritson received the excess of Warton's prolific delights. Warton's faults, however, should be set in context by an appreciation of the conditions under which he worked. Because he had been collecting materials since the early 1750s, he often found himself relying on old memoranda in pocketbooks kept at Winchester and Trinity, where entries from Bishops' Registers jostled with pressmarks and illegible shorthand. Each published volume also brought fresh information from correspondents, some giving their names, others writing anonymously, and as the work went on Warton chose to disrupt his chronology rather than omit any significant new item. After publication of the second volume, for example, he received two anonymous letters from someone with a wide knowledge of Spanish troubadour literature,⁵⁷ and so in volume 3, during a discussion of Tudor books of rhetoric, he introduced a digressive footnote containing a long extract from one of them, “from an ingenious correspondent, who has not given me the honour of his name.”⁵⁸ Another instance of a late influx of new material causing problems is John Watson Reed's transcriptions from MS Cotton Galba E ix.⁵⁹ Warton thought these too important to ignore, and therefore turned aside from the poetry of Sir Thomas More to introduce twenty-seven pages of extracts from Ywain and Gawain with the naive explanation that it was “to recall the reader's attention to the poetry and language of the last century.”⁶⁰ In a similar way, Minot's poems were introduced rather awkwardly into both text and footnotes.⁶¹ Unfortunately for Warton, this happened to be his helper's “first Essay in transcribing” and was not very neat or very accurate. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Ritson condemning Warton's inaccurate text of Minot. Mistakes and organizational lapses could sometimes be a result of the inchoateness of the field in which he worked, and this is something his scholarly correspondence may help us to appreciate.

In the wake of Ritson's attack the impetus behind the writing of the History seems to have slackened. Warton never gave up the project, but by the following year he had begun editing the “minor” poems of Milton, a work that clearly impinged on the History's future territory. Through many letters of the 1780s we can see the edition grow. What was to have been a work of Taste, a justification of the early Milton against the “specious” criticisms of Johnson,⁶² becomes much more. Warton the antiquarian and topographer will not rest until he has found the poet's will and traced his dwellings. The correspondence offers a fascinating picture of the scholarly network within which Warton worked: Sir John Hawkins offered him notes on music,⁶³ Charles Burney wrote a whole appendix on the poet's Greek verse,⁶⁴ Sir William Scott found legal documents detailing the dispute between Milton's widow and daughters over the poet's property,⁶⁵ John “Don” Bowle lent books and sent notes on Comus,⁶⁶ William Julius Mickle looked for papers and Josiah Dornford searched for Milton's house,⁶⁷ and both George Steevens and Joseph Warton wrote with corrections and additions later incorporated into the second edition.⁶⁸ At Warton's death this manuscript had been delivered to the printers, and he was working on a second volume to include Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.⁶⁹

Another distraction from Warton's work on the History was his involvement in the Chatterton controversy. The recently discovered poems of the Bristol monk, Thomas Rowley, seemed at a stroke to redeem the literature of the fifteenth century. But Warton was not convinced and devoted a section of volume 2 of the History to exposing them as forgeries. He recognized Chatterton as a “prodigy of genius” who “would have proved the first of English poets, had he reached a maturer age,”⁷⁰ and he quoted generously from the texts in question; but his wide scholarly experience left him in no doubt that they were modern productions. The Chatterton controversy reached its climax in 1782 when Jeremiah Milles produced an edition of Rowley that supported their genuineness. Warton's weighty Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley published in March that year (with a second edition in June) showed common sense and scholarship in a debate that was frequently short of both.⁷¹ Along with contributions by Tyrwhitt and Malone, it was decisive in proving the Rowley poems fabrications. While Warton worked on his second edition, the effervescent George Steevens helped keep the controversy bubbling away in the newspapers and supplied his friend with the latest London gossip and morsels for his “lion.”⁷² Steevens's letters to Warton during 1782 catch the playful mood of the anti-Rowleians, for whom scholarship and satirical fun could be combined.

It was Warton's Shakespeare studies that had brought Steevens into correspondence with him. In November 1773 he accepted Warton's suggested emendation of Othello, 2.1.297 (“trash”), a widely accepted reading that is attributed in modern editions to Steevens. In fact, Warton's substantial and detailed Shakespeare notes (offering analogues, explanations, and emendations) have been overlooked since they became embedded in the “Variorum” edition.⁷³ Warton also influenced Shakespearean scholarship indirectly through the work of Edmond Malone, with whom he corresponded during the 1780s. Malone's 1780 Supplement had printed Warton's extended note on Shakespeare, the D'Avenant family, and the Crown Inn,⁷⁴ and in preparing his ground-breaking 1790 edition Malone relied on Warton for regular help. Throughout the forty-nine surviving letters the assistance is almost wholly one way. Warton supplied Malone with transcripts from John Aubrey's “brief lives,” which had become known to scholars thanks to one of his own footnotes,⁷⁵ and he sent the younger scholar copies of the 1596 edition of Venus and Adonis and Chettle's Kind-Harts Dreame with its apology to Shakespeare. Malone's “Historical Account of the English Stage” (whose sections on mysteries and moralities are packed with quotations from Warton's History) was extended by nineteen pages to accommodate material discussed with Warton during 1789.

The Warton-Malone correspondence is significant because it shows the old ways of scholarship at the service of the new. Warton's rummaging curiosity and fascination for the past encounter Malone's more analytical and objective approach. When Warton sends him a transcript of Aubrey's “life” of Ben Jonson, he is bombarded with questions: is there any other source that places Jonson's birth in Warwickshire? Can Warton add to Malone's list of Aubrey's friends? What did Wood and Aubrey quarrel about, and when? How can he find the poems of “Jonson Junior”? When were Aubrey's accounts of Shakespeare and Jonson written? Did Wood jot down any queries in the margin?⁷⁶ This is curiosity too, but the kind bred in someone who knows what he is looking for. At moments like this we glimpse the older generation of antiquarian-scholar being superseded. Building on Warton's historical approach, Malone brought something more to scholarship: an objectivity, a sense of disciplined inquiry, and a mind with a firm grasp of the problems in hand.

In this relationship we have in prosaic terms the dynamics of Warton's later poetry, where indulgence and discipline, fancy and judgment, meet. Poems: A New Edition, with Additions (first and second editions, 1777; third edition, 1779) marked a clear break with his work of the 1740s. The poems collected in this volume have a subtle verbal music, occasional echoes of older bardic invocation, moments of personal meditation and mood-painting, and visual images invoking nostalgia and fancy. Of the odes, the companion pieces “The Crusade” and “The Grave of King Arthur” have the incantatory fervor of the old bards; quite different are “On the First of April” and “The Hamlet,” which celebrate the English countryside in a wealth of atmospheric detail, using octosyllabic couplets to subtle effect; the stanzaic ode “The Suicide” has a lurid sublimity that proved popular in its time but has perhaps worn less well.

Probably the most influential poems in the collection are the sonnets, which did much to re-establish the popularity of this distinctive Renaissance form.⁷⁷ Warton uses them for meditations on a lost world of the past, a personal bereavement only his imagination can allay. Stonehenge, Wilton House, Dugdale's Monasticon, King Arthur's Round Table at Winchester, and his own “native stream” of the Loddon are some of the contexts for Warton's thoughts on the mind's craving to recapture a lost delight. Sometimes in these later poems he places the pull of the past in tension with the claims of the present, in a struggle between imagination and reason or judgment. Again the key is to be found in Warton the literary historian, to whom the Elizabethan Age was the most conducive to great poetry. He speaks of it in the History as “that period, propitious to the operations of original and true poetry, when the coyness of fancy was not always proof against the approaches of reason, when genius was rather directed than governed by judgement.”⁷⁸

Such tensions form the subject of Verses on Sir Joshua Reynold's Painted Window at New-College Oxford (1782), published a few months after Reynolds had proposed his friend for membership of The Club. It is often seen as a recantation by Warton of his renegade delight in the Gothic:

Sudden, the sombrous imagery is fled,
Which late my visionary rapture fed:
Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain,
And brought my bosom back to truth again.

But the victory is won by Decorum and Truth, two of the fundamental principles of Reynolds's Discourses on Art (1769-90), and the whole poem is really Warton's graceful compliment to his friend and patron. Reynolds jokingly remarked that he had “no great confidence in the recantation of such an old offender,”⁷⁹ and indeed when the east end of New College Chapel was dismantled to reveal the original Gothic stonework, one observer reported that “Poor Thomas fetched such sighs as I could not have thought he could breathe.”⁸⁰

Reynolds was certainly a good friend. His 1784 portrait of Warton still looks down on diners in the Senior Common Room at Trinity, and it was to him that Warton owed his appointment in 1785 to the Poet Laureateship, with its twice-yearly duty of composing a formal ode to be set to music for performance at court. Warton's first ode (for the King's birthday in 1785) had to be hurriedly written, leading to good-humored mockery in the volume Probationary Odes (1785),⁸¹ in which the burlesque offerings of various “candidates” were placed, with little incongruity, alongside Warton's own. By all accounts, Warton enjoyed the joke. His later laureate odes, however, were effective and dignified, and in them he took the opportunity to explore both historical and descriptive subjects, including the tradition of the Laureateship itself. It was generally held that Warton, whose tenure fell between those of William Whitehead and Henry James Pye, raised the reputation of the post at a difficult moment in its history.⁸²

In the 1780s Warton gathered around him a group of young poets, many of whom were former schoolboys at Winchester. The best remembered disciples are three Trinity friends and contemporaries: Henry Headley, William Benwell, and William Lisle Bowles, whose 1789 volume of sonnets had such a powerful effect on the young Coleridge.⁸³ Sir Herbert Croft wrote to John Nichols on 15 May 1786: “The magnetism of Tom Warton draws many a youth into rhymes and loose stockings, who had better be thinking of prose and propriety.”⁸⁴ Croft's hinting at student radicalism in the Warton circle might seem surprising, given the Laureate's obvious loyalty to tradition and monarchy. But there is an ironic twist here: the Wartonian project of recovering purer voices from the past, unencumbered by the structures of contemporary society and speaking a primal language of nature and the imagination, can be shown to have set the agenda for the radical young poets of the 1790s. These poets of sensibility were viciously attacked in the Anti-Jacobin, for whom Sensibility herself (the “Sweet Child of sickly fancy”) was a democrat goddess. Warton's rediscovery of a root system of poetic language helped supply a radical discourse for the next generation.⁸⁵

Much of Warton's poetry is about the location and recovery of texts, of authentic voices; they are revived not as something curious and dead, but as a resource that can feed into the work of the modern poet. Likewise in his History he reached back into the past to explore continuities and re-establish a tradition of which he felt himself a part. Thomas Warton's achievement across so many aspects of literary studies is one that itself deserves to be recovered. The editor hopes that this edition of Warton's correspondence will make him more accessible to present-day scholars and will bring his achievement into focus. At a time when the traditional canon of eighteenth-century literature has expanded in exciting ways, Warton's is a voice that needs to be more widely heard.

Notes

1. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1963), p. 281.

2. See letters 64 and 353 [in the present volume]. Gibbon's copy of the Life of Bathurst is in Trinity College Library. For his praise of Warton's History, see Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (1909-14), 4:163 (chap. 38, note 148).

3. René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, 1941), p. 199.

4. Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, ed. Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1800), p. lxi.

5. Review of Hayley's Memoirs, in Quarterly Review 31 (1824-25): 289.

6. Horace Walpole to William Mason, 18 April 1778. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 28:385.

7. Review of George Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets, in Edinburgh Review 7 (April 1804): 151-63, p. 153.

8. See letters 133, 251, and 253.

9. “Life of Pope,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), 3:251.

10. See letter 54, note 3.

11. Thraliana. The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1951), 1:209. Southey's volume (with Robert Lovell) was Poems: containing the Retrospect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets &c. (Bath, 1795).

12. Letter 14.

13. See, for example, Edmund Gosse, “Two Pioneers of Romanticism: Joseph and Thomas Warton,” Proceedings of the British Academy 7 (1915-16): 145-63.

14. See Fairer 1975, pp. 401-2.

15. See Fairer 1975, also Christina le Prevost, “More Unacknowledged Verse by Joseph Warton,” RES 37 (1986): 317-47, and Arthur H. Scouten, “The Warton Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature,” Études Anglaises 40 (1987): 434-47.

16. Letter 13.

17. Letters 16, 43, and 10.

18. Letters 13, 21, and 54.

19. Letters 523 and 525.

20. In letter 220, after apologizing to Garrick for not attending the Stratford Jubilee, Warton confesses to having slipped off to Spithead to see the Russian sailors. At the close of their 1776 visit, Johnson remarked to Boswell about Warton's shyness: “all men who have that love of low company are also timid” (The Ominous Years, p. 281).

21. See Douglas Lane Patey, “‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” SEL, 33 (1993): 587-608.

22. Now BL C.28m.7.

23. See Fairer 1981, p. 41.

24. Letter 59.

25. The writer of an article in the London Magazine for 1821 considered that some of Warton's odes “might more properly be termed idylliums” (p. 126), and Coleridge noted: “The greater part of Warton's Sonnets are severe and masterly likenesses of the Greek επιγραμμα[b.tau ]α” (Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge [Oxford, 1912], 2:1139).

26. Letter 65.

27. See letter 143.

28. See David Fairer, “Oxford and the Literary World,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1986), pp. 779-805, pp. 793-96.

29. Letters 556 and 529.

30. See Francis Newbery's anecdote in Charles Welsh, A Bookseller of the Last Century (London, 1885), pp. 67-68.

31. Byron to Hodgson, 29 June 1811, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 2:54.

32. Section 43 of the History (“General view and character of the poetry of queen Elisabeth's age”) is close at times to the Warton of the humorous poems.

33. Companion to the Guide, pp. 31-32.

34. See letter 290, note 1.

35. Letter 367.

36. Letter 136. Both figures were the subject of Warton poems: “Sacellum Coll. SS. Trin. Oxon. Instauratum” (Mant, 2:230-44), and the unpublished “Ode. On the Monument of Sir Thomas Pope,” Bodleian MS Dep. c. 638, ff. 51 and 118.

37. See Appendix C.

38. Letters 194 and 198.

39. Letters 459 and 527.

40. Letters 351, 490, 521, 532.

41. Letters 292, 302, 549, 531, 533, 535.

42. Cornhill Magazine 11 (January-June 1865): 734-35.

43. 1762 Observations, 2:184-98.

44. Letter 99.

45. It was reprinted in Essays on Gothic Architecture, by the Rev. T. Warton, Rev. J. Bentham, Captain Grose, and the Rev. J. Milner (London, 1800; 2d ed., 1802).

46. Mant, 1:xxxii. Warton refers to it in the third volume (1781) of the History: “But, with the careless haste of a lover, I am anticipating what I have to say of it in my History of Gothic Architecture in England” (3:xxii).

47. Letters 103, 105, 106, and 109. See Fairer 1981, pp. 38-41.

48. Warton corresponded with Barrett in 1774 about the Rowley poems (see Appendix B). For Warton's correspondence with Ducarel, see Calendar.

49. Ducarel to Barrett, 18 March 1772, printed in GM 56 (1786): 461.

50. Rinaker, pp. 177-232.

51. Discovered thanks to Percy's inquiries. See letter 107, note 2.

52. Letter 312.

53. Letter 388.

54. Letters 212 and 213.

55. Letter 364.

56. Letters 420 and 421.

57. Letters 368 and 370.

58. History, 3:349.

59. Letters 372 and 374.

60. History, 3:107-8.

61. History, 3:103-4, 107, 146-51.

62. Letter 476.

63. Letters 456 and 457.

64. Letter 565.

65. Letter 572.

66. Letters 441, 444, 447, and 450.

67. Letters 451 and 580.

68. Letters 467 and 477.

69. See letter 476, note 1.

70. History, 2:157.

71. Though Warton upset the Rowleian George Catcott. See letter 412.

72. Letter 406.

73. Nineteen first appeared in Johnson's 1765 appendix, and forty-nine were printed in the Oxford edition of 1770-71. These were included by Steevens in his 1773 edition. See letter 303, note 5, and letter 209, note 3.

74. Letter 369.

75. In a digressive footnote in his Life of Bathurst (pp. 153-55) Warton had quoted extracts from Aubrey's jottings on Spenser and Shakespeare “as a specimen” of a manuscript “very little known, but valuable.” This caused Richard Farmer to make use of Aubrey in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767).

76. Letter 592.

77. William Hazlitt often praised Warton's sonnets: “Thomas Warton was a man of taste and genius. His Sonnets I cannot help preferring to any in the language” (Select British Poets, 1824. Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 9:242). He quoted three of them in full in his sixth lecture, On the English Poets, 1818 (Howe, 5:120-22).

78. History, 3:501.

79. Letter 409.

80. Nichols, Anecdotes, 3:699.

81. Letter 495.

82. Robert Southey, having been commissioned to write a birthday ode for the King, wrote: “as for making anything good of a birthday ode, I might as well attempt to manufacture silk purses from sows' ears. Like Warton, I shall give the poem an historical character; but I shall not do this as well as Warton, who has done it very well” (Southey to May, 4 March 1821, Life and Correspondence, ed. C. C. Southey [London, 1850] 5:63).

83. Biographia Literaria, chapter 1.

84. Nichols, Illustrations, 5:210. Two other significant disciples were the Wykehamists Thomas Russell (1762-88) and John Bampfylde (1754-97). For a discussion of the Warton School of poets, see J. B. Bamborough, “William Lisle Bowles and the Riparian Muse,” in Essays and Poems Presented to Lord David Cecil, ed. W. W. Robson (London, 1970), pp. 93-108.

85. See David Fairer, “Baby Language and Revolution: The Early Poetry of Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb,” Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 74 (April 1991): 33-52.