SOURCE: Pittock, Joan. “The Taste for the Gothic: Thomas Warton and the History of English Poetry.” In The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton, pp. 176-214. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

[In the following essay, Pittock traces influences on “Gothic” poems by Warton and others and critiques his History of English Poetry.]

I

When [Samuel] Johnson's Dictionary appeared in 1755 it contained no reference to the word ‘Gothic’. Yet Horace Walpole had succumbed to the spell of Gothic architecture in building his castle at Strawberry Hill in 1750, and the vogue for Gothic as well as Chinese in design is attested by Robert Lloyd in his description of ‘The Cit's County Box’ (1757):

The traveller with amazement sees
A temple, Gothic or Chinese,
With many a bell or tawdry rag on
And crested with a sprawling dragon,
A ditch of water four foot wide …
With angles, curves, and zig-zag lines …

The taste for the nebulously exotic, wild or fanciful could be localised to best effect for several reasons in those periods of history which might be thought to have produced Gothic buildings. When Walpole published his Castle of Otranto in 1764 he subtitled it ‘A Gothic Tale’. And as the Gothic novel developed in the work of Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and ‘Monk’ Lewis it held spellbound a reading public wider and more heterogeneous than ever before. So in Northanger Abbey (written in 1798) even the judicious Henry Tilney confesses himself incapable of leaving The Mysteries of Udolpho half-finished, while the story affords his girlish heroine not only ‘the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination’ but an inability to control her state of mind when she at last encounters an authentic abbey.

II

Clearly Gothic architecture was of less significance, culturally speaking, than the emotions it aroused by its associations, its suggestions of the manners and trappings of what was supposed to have been the medieval way of life. But the cultivation of a taste for the Gothic in the novel was to a considerable extent a continuation, at a culturally more sophisticated level, of the tales of heroic deeds, bloody murders and supernatural horrors which had been the fiction of the unrefined reading public as far back as the sixteenth century.

In the later seventeenth century ‘Gothic’ had become equivalent to rude, barbarous and uncouth: its primary connection after all was with the race of vandals which had overrun and demolished the civilisation of ancient Rome. For this reason it was inherently opposed to classicism, while the ‘Gothic’ in relation to the architecture and literature of the medieval period was likewise associated with whatever was extravagant, fanciful, wild and uncontrolled by the overall sense of design and function which was so pre-eminently the virtue of the buildings and literary forms of classical antiquity.

The difficulties of providing a definition for so potentially ambivalent a word are best illustrated by Addison. In the Spectator, no. 415, he compares the two types of architecture in terms of their effect on the mind:

Let any one reflect on the Disposition of Mind he finds in himself, at his first Entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his Imagination is filled with something Great and Amazing; and, at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothick Cathedral, tho' it be five times larger than the other; which can arise from nothing else but the Greatness of the Manner in the one, and the Meanness in the other.

But, somewhat paradoxically, in defending his admiration for the ballad of Chevy Chase, he removes the ballad from its historical context and employs it as a neoclassical touchstone of true taste:

I know nothing which more shews essential and inherent Perfection of Simplicity of Thought, above that which I call the Gothick Manner in Writing, than this, that the first pleases all Kinds of Palates, and the latter only such as have formed to themselves a wrong artificial Taste upon little fanciful Authors and Writers of Epigram. Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a Reader of plain common Sense, who would neither relish nor comprehend an Epigram of Martial, or a Poem of Cowley: So, on the contrary, an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance; and the Reason is plain, because the same Paintings of Nature which recommend it to the most ordinary Reader, will appear Beautiful to the most refined.

(no. 70)

Cowley and Martial are, then, Gothic in their artificiality and fancifulness. But this was inevitably an ephemeral distinction, only sustained by the familiar Gothic-Grecian antithesis. More generally acceptable is the verdict on contemporary taste which I cited in chapter 1:

I look upon those writers as Goths in Poetry, who, like those in Architecture, not being able to come up to the Beautiful Simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavoured to supply its Place with all the Extravagancies of an irregular Fancy. … The Taste of most of our English Poets, as well as Readers, is extremely Gothick.

To set the classical against the English tradition in this way is to associate the violations committed by Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, against the classical modes of composition in epic and tragedy, with the wild and fanciful exuberance of Gothic architecture. And so indeed John Hughes attempted to defend Spenser's Faerie Queene three years later, by suggesting that in structure it resembled a Gothic rather than a Grecian edifice. Pope employed the same analogy in expressing his appreciation of Shakespeare in 1725: Gothic architecture is ‘more strong and solemn’ than neat modern buildings; ‘Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill placed and unequal to its grandeur.’

III

In his account of The Gothic Revival Sir Kenneth Clark quoted the analogy employed by Hughes and Pope to show that although¹

These two passages have been much quoted by historians of literature to prove that Gothic architecture influenced literary taste. … I think the reverse is true. We accept as almost axiomatic the generalisation that in England a love and understanding of literature greatly exceeds, and indeed swamps, appreciation of the visual arts; and a new current of taste is likely to be first felt in a literary channel. Shakespeare and Spenser would be appreciated before a Gothic cathedral; and in fact it was the analogous forms of these great writers which shed lustre on the despised architectural style. Above all it was Shakespeare, so unmistakably great in defiance of all the rules of Aristotle, who broke the back of classical prejudice. If Aristotle's rules could be defied with success, why not those of Vitruvius too? Gothic architecture crept in through a literary analogy.

But the experience derived from the poetry of Spenser or the plays of Shakespeare could not be justified seriously enough to counter criticisms of defects in structure and tone merely in terms of an architectural analogy. Sir Kenneth Clark himself concluded that the writers of the Gothic novel:

have their place in the Gothic Revival because they show the frame of mind in which the multitude of novel-readers looked at medieval buildings. But if we search the second half of the eighteenth century for literary influences on the Gothic Revival we need not spend time on the Castle of Otranto's offspring, but on those books which show a real interest in the middle age, a veneration for its arts and manners, and a serious study of its monuments.

We are in the province not only of imaginative response to literature but of antiquarianism and scholarship:

When antiquarianism reappears as a vital interest it is in the persons of Gray and Warton. Now Gray and Warton were poets. Their enthusiasm for Gothic springs from a literary impulse which first made itself felt as antiquarianism was beginning to decline. This literary impulse, if anything, can be called the true starting-point of the Gothic revival.

IV

If indeed there was a decline in antiquarianism—though the Society of Antiquarians was incorporated in 1751—it was chiefly in terms of its social acceptability. The study of the abstruse and recondite to no socially useful end had been pilloried by Pope when he placed Thomas Hearne in the third book of his ‘Dunciad’ (1728):

          ‘But who is he, in closet close y-pent,
Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?’
‘Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight,
On parchment scraps y-fed, and Wormius hight.
To future ages may thy dulness last,
As thou preserv'st the dulness of the past!
          ‘There, dim in clouds, the poring Scholiasts mark,
Wits, who like Owls, see only in the dark,
A Lumberhouse of Books in ev'ry head,
For ever reading, never to be read!

(185-94)

The cultural gap between the antiquarian and the man of taste narrowed as the study of registers and chronicles became essential to the work of the scholar and critic. The work of editors like Warton, Percy and Ritson was only made possible by the perseverance of those whom Pope had so lightly dismissed. Hearne's editions of the chronicles of Robert of Gloucester (1724) and Peter Langtoft (1725), Ames's Typographical Antiquities (1749), with its description of the contents of Malory's Morte Darthur, Walpole's Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (1758) augmented the earlier work of Bale, Camden, Leland, A Wood, and their successors, Oldys, Wanley and Hickes. New areas of literary enquiry were opened up by the cataloguing of manuscript collections. Oxford University published a catalogue of manuscripts in 1697; Wanley's catalogue of the Harleian collection, published by order of the trustees of the British Museum in 1759, contained substantial extracts from some of the entries; and in 1767 the Oxford University published a catalogue of the manuscripts held by the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Abroad St Palaye published his Mémoires de l'Ancienne Chévalerie in 1759.

The publication of early literature, whether in the reprinting of England's Helicon, or Tottel's Miscellany, Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), or in contemporary collections like those of Ramsay, met a demand not from scholars so much as from the general public. So Shenstone wrote to Percy in 1760 urging him to publish the manuscript ballad, song and romance material which he had discovered, but not without making certain alterations and improvements which would adapt the original material to the taste of the general reader, for²

All People of Taste throu'out the Kingdom will rejoice to see a judicious, a correct and elegant collection of such Pieces. For after all, ‘tis such Pieces that contain y^e true Chemical Spirit or Essence of Poetry, a little of which properly mingled is sufficient to strengthen and keep alive very considerable Quantities of the kind. 'Tis y^e voice of Sentiment rather yⁿ the the Language of Reflection, and adapted peculiarly to strike y^e Passions, which is the only Merit of Poetry that has obtained my regard of late.

Shenstone was proved right. And after all it was Macpherson who by decking out legendary scraps with biblical cadences and contemporary sentiments achieved so great a success with Ossian. The cultivation of the public taste had never blended more happily with the growth of a sense of historical perspectives and an illuminating and revivifying range of imaginative expression in earlier literature. When Warton discovered James I's Kingis Quair Percy wrote to him at Oxford:³

Were I at the fountain head of literature, as you are, I should be tempted to transcribe some of the curiosities that lie mouldering in your libraries for publication—I am persuaded this of James would be acceptable to the public, both to the Antiquarians and men of taste:—this and two or three other such pieces would make an additional volume to the Ever green or Collection of ancient Scots poems of which a second Edition has lately been called for.

There was a general uneasiness felt among scholars lest they should appear to their potential public as too pedantic, though their keen interest in exact scholarly enquiry is illustrated in the mid-century correspondence between Percy and his collaborators—Warton, Evans, Farmer, Malone, Shenstone and Johnson. So Warton explains to his readers the need for the investigation into the use of romance, allegory and legend by Spenser in writing the Faerie Queene:

In reading the works of an author who lived in a remote age, it is necessary, that we should look back upon the customs and manners which prevailed in his age; that we should place ourselves in his situation, and circumstances; that so we may be the better enabled to judge and discern how his turn of thinking, and manner of composing were biass'd, influenc'd, and, as it were, tinctur'd, by very familiar and reigning appearances, which are utterly different from those with which we are at present surrounded. For want of this caution, too many readers view the knights and damsels, the turnaments and enchantments of Spenser with modern eyes, never considering that the encounters of Chivalry subsisted in an author's age, as as has been before hinted; that romances were then most eagerly and universally read; and that thus, Spenser from the fashion of his age, was naturally dispos'd to undertake a recital of Chivalrous achievements, and to become, in short, a Romantic Poet.

(p. 217)

Spenser was, then, a poet conditioned by his environment as much as Blackwell and Wood had shown Homer to have been, and in the same way as Lowth had demonstrated the relationship between the style and subject-matter of the Scriptures and the customs and environment of the Hebrews.

As he shows in his use of terms in the 1765 Preface Johnson was quick to see the potentialities of this approach as a way out of the stalemate at which criticism seem to have arrived in working according to the requirements of ideal forms. He wrote to congratulate Warton on his achievement in a well-known letter:

You have shewn to all, who shall hereafter attempt the study of our ancient authors, the way to success; by directing them to the perusal of the books which these authors had read. Of this method, Hughes and men much greater than Hughes, seem never to have thought. The reason why the authours, which are yet read, of the sixteenth century, are so little understood, is, that they are read alone; and no help is borrowed from those who lived with them, or before them.

(Life, p. 190)

A second enlarged edition of the Observations came out in two volumes in 1762, in the same year as Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Warton had, then, eight years earlier, already suggested what Hurd specifically undertook, a defence of the manners of chivalry as the most promising subject-matter for poetry; though he does not imply as Hurd does that the classical authors might have benefited from an acquaintance with chivalry and romance: the myths and legends of antiquity had, after all, afforded a similar repository of superstition and fancy. In the Observations of 1754 he wrote:

Though the Faerie Queene does not exhibit that economy of plan, and exact arrangement of parts which Epic severity requires, yet we scarcely regret the loss of these, while their place is so amply supplied, by something which more powerfully attracts us, as it engages the affection of the heart, rather than the applause of the head; and if there be any poem whose graces please, because they are situated beyond the reach of art, and where the faculties of creative imagination delight us, because they are unassisted and unrestrained by those of deliberate judgment, it is in this of which we are now speaking. To sum up all in a few words; tho' in the Faerie Queene we are not satisfied as critics, yet we are transported as readers.

(pp. 12-13)

The distinction Warton makes here between the reader and the critic is one which he shows applies equally to the poet and the critic. He concludes his postscript to the work with a quotation from Spenser in which the critic identifies himself with the statements of the poet:

The waies thro' which my weary steps I guide,
In this Delightful Land of Faery,
Are so exceeding spacious and wide,
And sprinkled with such sweet varietie
Of all that pleasant is to ear or eye
That I nigh ravisht with rare thought's delight,
My tedious travel do forgett thereby,
And when I gin to feel decay of might,
It strength to me supplies, and cheares my dulled spright.

The same reaction to Spenser was expressed by Goldsmith in the Critical Review for February 1759:

There is a pleasing tranquillity of mind which ever attends the reading of this ancient poet. We leave the ways of the present world, and all the ages of primeval innocence and happiness rise to our view. … The imagination of his reader leaves reason behind, pursues the tale without considering the allegory, and upon the whole, is charmed without instruction.

Gray told Nicholls that ‘he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously’,⁴ and it was Gray whose odes, published at Strawberry Hill by Walpole in 1757, were a deliberate attempt to recreate the tone and subject-matter of Gothic poetry.

The enriching of the poet's imagination as well as the illumination and pleasure of the general reader were effected by Spenser, and these two ends were those which Shenstone had referred to as the impression created by the early poetry which he was encouraging Percy to publish in the letter I quoted earlier. With Thomas Warton's work we move into more clearly defined areas of Gothic inspiration where the colleges of Oxford, and cathedrals, abbeys and castles alike summon up the visions, which were for him the province of true poetry, while through an omnivorous appetite for antiquities and a real sensitivity to the romantic elements in the poetry of Spenser and Milton he evolves for the first time an interpretation of the development of a history of English poetry.

V

In 1748 William Mason published ‘Isis’, an elegy attacking the political principles and the dissipation of Oxford. The following year Thomas Warton, then aged twenty-one, replied in ‘The Triumph of Isis’, acclaiming Oxford as a bastion of enlightenment and a haunt of the Muses:

Green as of old each olived portal smiles,
And still the Graces build my Grecian piles:
My Gothic spires in ancient glory rise,
And dare with wonted pride to rush into the skies.

(77-80)

It is the Gothic aspect of Oxford rather than the Grecian which is seen as the stimulus to reflection which awakens the poetic sensibility:

Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime,
Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time;
Ye massy piles of old munificence,
At once the pride of learning and defence;
Ye cloisters pale, that, lengthening to the sight,
To contemplation, step by step, invite;
Ye high-arch'd walks, where oft the whispers clear
Of harps unseen have swept the poet's ear;
Ye temples dim, where pious duty pays
Her holy hymns of ever-echoing praise;
Lo! your loved Isis, from the bordering vale,
With all a mother's fondness bids you hail!

(149-60)

The poet's dedication to his vision connects Spenser's Faerie Queene with Milton's minor poems—there is the poet's awareness of his vocation in ‘Lycidas’ and the indulgence in contemplation as a means of gaining access to a variety of worlds in ‘Il Penseroso’. Of Milton's description of the ‘embowed roof’ in this last poem Warton writes in the second edition of the Observations:

Impressions made in earliest youth, are ever afterwards most strongly felt; and I am inclin'd to think, that Milton was first affected with, and often indulged the pensive pleasure, which the awful solemnity of a Gothic church conveys to the mind, and which is here so feelingly described, while he was a schoolboy at St. Paul's. The church was then in its original Gothic state, and one of the noblest patterns of that kind of architecture.

(ii, 135)

Such solemn glooms were congenial to the youthful Warton's soul (his first poem of note, written when he was only seventeen, is ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy’) as they were, he thought, to the poets he loved best.

But Warton shows, too, an awareness of the danger inherent in prolonged introspection on the part of the poet. In ‘The Suicide’, for example, which Goethe mentions as influencing the sensibility of young Werther, the Muse is responsible for filling the poet's ‘soft ingenious mind / With many a feeling too refined’ so that

More wounds than Nature gave he knew,
While Misery's form his fancy drew
In dark ideal hues, and sorrows not its own.

(46-7, 52-4)

Later Warton made what has been regarded as a repudiation of his allegiance to the Gothic in his ‘Verses on Sir Joshua Reynold's Painted Window at New College, Oxford’ (1778). He describes himself as having been:

A faithless truant to the classic page,—
          Long have I lov'd to catch the simple chime
          Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime.

(8-10)

He dwells on the attractions of the Gothic at length, whilst assigning a controlling role to those of the Grecian:

… chief, enraptured have I loved to roam,
A lingering votary, the vaulted dome,
Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride,
Their mingling branches shoot from side to side;
Where elfin sculptors with fantastic clue,
O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew;
Where Superstition, with capricious hand,
In many a maze the wreathed window plann'd,
With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane.

(17-25)

But as he looks at Reynolds's window he acknowledges the power of formal design and lucidity of colour:

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;
To truth by no peculiar taste confined,
Whose universal pattern strikes mankind;
To truth, whose bold and unresisted aim
Checks frail caprice, and Fashion's fickle claim;
To truth, whose charms deception's magic quell,
And bind coy Fancy in a stronger spell.

(61-70)

In Reynolds's window the Graces are wedded to ‘the Gothic pile’. The Grecian is necessary to ensure permanence of appeal in checking the subjective waywardness of individual fancy. One might perhaps see this as reflecting the two aspects of taste at this time: the public and social taste which is a matter for critical discrimination and assessment according to recognisable and generally acknowledged principles, that taste which operates to establish standards and to ‘improve opinion into knowledge’; and secondly, in the taste for the Gothic, that encouragement of an actively responsive sensibility, necessary to arouse in the reader, essential to stimulate the creative energy of the poet.

But to Warton the Grecian also was a source of poetical delight. He devoted his lectures in his two terms as Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1756-66) to Greek poetry. In his inaugural lecture he shows a sensitive awareness of what is traditionally a vitally important but at this time neglected function of poetry.

In itself, he says, the reading of poetry nourishes the faculties of man and enlarges his potentialities for assimilating different kinds of wisdom:⁵

the man who has spent his leisure for a time on these more polite and refined letters will thereafter follow up the more exacting and abstruse literature with greater acumen and with a mind more nimble and more ready to tackle any study you wish; he has also prepared for himself this pleasure in which he can withdraw into a tranquil haven from the tension of thought, and in which, exhausted and over-whelmed by over-work he can take refuge and find rest.

This, he concludes, is because:

We humans are so shaped in our inner selves, there exists in us such a kind of delicate and fastidious feeling, that we are by no means content with things as they in fact are, suffering as we do from a certain dryness (to confess the truth) and poverty. … In all things … we strive for an outward beauty and charm. And human nature seems to seek out this end, that somewhere there may be accorded a place to that which we call refined and tasteful.

So he enlarges on the beauties of natural scenery as the divine provision made for this end, and, as he makes clear in his edition of Theocritus (comparing the pastorals of Theocritus with those of Virgil) it is the particular selection of detail which alerts the reader to an imaginative participation in the experience evoked by such a scene. This use of detail accounts to Warton for the superiority of Theocritus. ‘Virgil becomes thin and meagre where Theocritus, treating the same matter, becomes fuller, copious and richer, because Theocritus describes things fully whereas Virgil only hints at them.’ The pastorals of Theocritus as compared with those of Virgil exemplify beauty as opposed to mere symmetry and refinement. ‘They (the pastorals of Theocritus) were beautiful precisely because they preserved the unevenness of actual life.’ (preface). Of the description of the cup in the first idyll Warton comments: ‘the work [on the cup] consists of pastoral images, beautiful and brilliant. In selecting these the taste of the poet is seen no less than his invention. … I easily prefer the fulness of Theocritus to the dryness and sparseness of Virgil’ (i, 5n. line 27).

And in much of his own poetry he evokes the beauty of the natural scene with what is essentially an attempt at a similar delicacy and exactness. Although he begins his ‘Ode on the First of April’ with the conventional classical personae:

With dalliance rude young Zephyr woos
Coy May,

he explores their significance on a different note: Spring creeps timidly upon the land:

Scant along the ridgy land
The beans their new-born ranks expand:
The fresh-turn'd soil with tender blades
Thinly the sprouting barley shades:
Fringing the forest's devious edge,
half robed appears the hawthorn hedge;
Or to the distant eye displays
Weakly green its budding sprays.

(27-34)

VI

The interests which have been traced so far account for the pattern of Warton's work. He spent his life in Oxford, where he became Fellow of Trinity in 1750, Professor of Poetry in 1756 and Camden Professor of Ancient History in 1785; he occupied his leisure with his brother in Winchester College or travelling round the country examining buildings and landmarks of architectural, historical or legendary interest. His observations on these fill several notebooks and are still unpublished, though some of this work was used (in illustrating places mentioned by poets) in The History of English Poetry and in his edition of Milton's Poems on Several Occasions.

His work falls under three main heads. First, there is the working out of an English poetic tradition which he explored in the Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754); the History (1774, 1778 and 1781); his Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), and lastly his edition of Milton's minor poems (1785). The second group consists of work in classical literature: his edition of the Inscriptionum Romanarum Metricarum Delectus (1758) accompanied the delivery of his still unpublished lectures on the Greek writers to which I have already referred; the Anthologia Graeca appeared in 1766; and in 1770, with a prefatory essay which was an enlarged version of his lecture on pastoral poetry, his edition of Theocritus. Into the third group falls his antiquarian or topographical work: his Description of Winchester (1750), his Specimen of a History of Oxfordshire (1782), and the essay on Gothic architecture which originally appeared as part of the two-volume second edition of Observations (1762). The bulk of the material of the Life and Literary Remains of Ralph Bathurst (in two volumes, 1761), and of the Life of Sir Thomas Pope (1772), fall into this category, as they are closely connected with the history of the university and were produced by Warton as Fellow of Trinity under the spur of desire for preferment. There are, apart from these, odd contributions to the Idler—merely of entertainment value—and his popular and still amusing burlesque of the antiquarian pedantry of the language of guidebooks, A Companion to the Guide and a Guide to the Companion (1760). He became Camden Professor of Ancient History in 1785 and Poet Laureate in the same year. As laureate Warton is chiefly remarkable for contriving, as Peter Pindar noted, to slide off the Royal Occasion into Gothic inspiration with a happy and congenital irrelevance.

In The New Rolliad (no. 1, 1785) Warton is described as approaching the King with a ‘certain hasty spasmodic mumbling, together with two or three prompt quotations from Virgil’, and as associating the efficacy of his talent as laureate with ‘mist, darkness, and obscurity’ in connection with ‘the sublime and mysterious topics’ he touches on in his odes (pp. 284, 206-7). Throughout his career there is a continual intermingling of his different interests so that the sensitivity of the poet often guides the researches of the antiquarian and the concern for the standards of taste and exactness of scholarship augments the delight in the exuberance of fancy.

VII

Having given a retrospective account of English poetry before Spenser in Observations Warton adds: ‘from the age of Spenser, we shall find, that it (poetry) principally consisted in visions and allegories. Fancy was a greater friend to the dark ages, as they are called, than is commonly supposed’ (ii, 101-2). He appends a note: ‘This subject may, probably, be one day considered more at large in a regular history.’

His work on the Greek poets, and his researches into manuscript material, collating texts or consulting editions on Percy's behalf as well as his own—in a letter to Shenstone of 1762 Percy refers to Warton's sparing no pains in pursuing this kind of research—encouraged this ambition. In a letter to Percy in 1765 Warton expresses his intention of writing the history, and asserts that his materials for it are ‘almost ready’.

In 1766 Warton informs Percy that he has had to lay the work aside to prepare the edition of Theocritus which had been commenced in 1758, but in July 1768 he declares the publication of the edition imminent and promises himself ‘another Excursion into Fairy Land’. In the following year he declares: ‘I am sitting down in good Earnest to write the History of English Poetry. It will be a large work; but as variety of materials have been long collected, it will be soon completed.’⁶

The preface to the History itself suggests that Warton's intention is eminently orthodox:

In an age advanced to the highest degrees of refinement, that species of curiosity commences, which is busied in contemplating the progress of social life, in displaying the gradations of science, and in tracing the transitions from barbarism to civility.

Warton proceeds to insist on the sense of achievement which this must necessarily encourage, but apart from this social purpose there is another:

In the mean time, the manners, monuments, customs, practices, and opinions of antiquity, by forming so strong a contrast with those of our own times, and by exhibiting human nature and human inventions in new lights, in unexpected appearances, and in various forms, are objects which forcibly strike a feeling imagination.

This development in the argument is immediately checked, however: ‘Nor does this spectacle afford nothing more than a fruitless gratification to the fancy.’ The element of delight in the fancy and exuberance of earlier poetry is to be kept under the control of the social purpose of the history—to educate the public taste.

But the end of the third volume, published in 1781, saw Warton embarking on a ‘general View and Character of the Poetry of Queen Elisabeth's age’ and the few sheets of the fourth volume printed in his lifetime contained only an account of the satires of Marston and Hall. Other manuscript material was found to contain an account of the Elizabethan sonnet, but it seems a reasonable conclusion that Warton had little inclination to bring the historical account of English poetry beyond the Elizabethan period. His biographer, Richard Mant, considers the nature of the task remaining to be completed:

The next part of his employment was to have been a particular examination of this, our Augustan age of Poetry; and having, like Aeneas, surmounted the difficulties, and escaped from the obscurity, of Tartarus, he was now about to enter on the Elysian fields … But notwithstanding the enjoyment of these scenes must have been so congenial to his mind; though in his first edition of Milton's juvenile poems in 1785 he announces that speedily will be published the fourth and last volume of the History of English Poetry; and though four years had elapsed since the publication of the third volume, and five years afterwards elapsed between this notice and his death, the work (from what cause it does not appear) was never completed: whether it was that the long duration of the same employment had in the end occasioned disgust; or whether his subsequent attention was nearly engrossed by Milton, and thus diverted from the masters to their greater disciple … Certain … it is, that the work was never brought to a conclusion, though the completion of it would have entitled him to the receipt of a considerable sum: and there is reason to believe, that not much was written beyond what is in the possession of the public.

(pp. l-li)

It was, in fact (as the reviewer of Mant's biography in the Edinburgh Review to some extent realised), Warton's last work, the edition of Milton's minor poems, which provided some kind of conclusion—and indeed the only one which was logical—to the massive undertaking of the History. Referring to the edition of Milton's poems, the reviewer concludes: ‘These commentaries and his observations on Spenser, may now be regarded as in some degree supplemental to his great unfinished work on English poetry’ (ii, 258).

The drift of Warton's comments on these poems reveals a preoccupation with Milton as a neglected old English poet, the inheritor of the fictions and fable of his predecessors, of the story of ‘Cambuscan bold, Of Camball and of Algarsife’, of ‘masque and antique pageantry’. It was this which attracted Warton in the poetry of Milton, and it was almost certainly through these early poems that part at least of the magic and enchantment which were for Warton associated with the literature of the age of chivalry and superstition made its appeal. Warton's emphasis on the way in which Gothic and classical myth and legend go side by side in Milton's poetry is a continuation of and a fitting chronological conclusion to the interpretation of the nature of poetry which emerges from the three completed volumes of the History.

VIII

This is to some degree confirmed by the way in which Warton insisted on seeing the history of poetry evolve, a way which, as he knew, ran counter to the interpretations of Pope and Gray.

Outlines for the History exist in four different forms:the first is a brief sketch among Warton's manuscript annotations to his copy of the Faerie Queene; the second is the general survey of the development of poetry to the eighteenth century given in the Observations; the third was printed from the Trinity College MSS. by Clarissa Rinaker; and the fourth occurs in Warton's reply to a letter from Hurd which had contained Gray's plan for a history.

The first is a note in Warton's hand on the blank leaf facing the title page of ‘Prothalamion’:

The Rise and Progress of Allegoric Poetry in England 'till it's Consummation in Spenser, & it's Decline after him. We have the visionary Poet, or personification before P. Plowman, who drew it from the Troubadours. After him came Chaucer, Gower, Lidgate, (Harding) Barclay, Hawes, Skelton bad. Sackville, Spenser and effects ended with Fletcher.

The account in the Observations begins:

If we take a retrospect of english poetry from the age of Spenser, we shall find that it principally consisted in the allegoric species; but that this species never received its absolute consummation till it appeared with new lustre in the Faerie Queene …

(ii, 101)

Chaucer's invention and humour, Lydgate's improvements in versification are considered; then Warton comes to Stephen Hawes—‘a name generally unknown, and not mentioned by any compiler of the lives of english poets’:

This author was at this period the restorer of invention, which seems to have suffered a gradual degeneracy from the days of Chaucer. He not only revived, but improved, the antient allegoric vein, which Hardyng had almost entirely banished. Instead of that dryness of description, so remarkably disgusting in many of his predecessors, we are by this poet often entertained with the luxuriant effusions of Spenser.

(ii, 104)

The rise of classical studies in the reign of Henry VIII is related to a group of scholars ‘and the Greek language, in which are reposited the treasures of true learning now began to be taught and admir'd’; with Skelton poetry made no advances in versification, nor was his allegorical poetry remarkable. Reference is made to the allegorising successes of Lindsay and Dunbar, and to those of Sackville as the precursor of Spenser. But:

After the Fairy Queen, allegory began to decline, and by degrees gave way to a species of poetry whose images were of the metaphysical and abstracted kind. This fashion evidently took it's rise from the predominant studies of the times.

Allegory, notwithstanding, unexpectedly rekindled some faint sparks of its native splendor, in the Purple Island of Fletcher, with whom it almost as soon disappeared: when a poetry succeeded, in which imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram.

And he diagnoses the situation as it has affected the poetry of his contemporaries:

Poets began now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France. … The muses were debauched at court, and polite life, and familiar manners, became their only themes … The simple dignity of Milton was either entirely neglected, or mistaken for bombast and insipidity by the refined readers of a dissolute age, whose taste and morals were equally vitiated.

(ii, 110-12)

It is in the second edition, in which Warton had clearly become more confident of his own taste, that he explicitly associates the rise of satire with this decline. After ‘daring strokes of great conception’, Warton adds ‘Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France’. He omits from the opening pages of the second edition a reference to the ‘bad taste’ which prevailed when Spenser began to write the Faerie Queene, and he softens his earlier condemnation of Spenser's choosing to model his work on that of Ariosto rather than Tasso—Ariosto's superior in ‘conduct and decorum’. Between 1754 and 1762 the attitude towards things Gothic, strange or fanciful had clearly moved from a condemnation of its uncouth barbarism to what was at least an interested curiosity.

The structuring of each account in terms of allegorical poetry is the most obvious feature too of the third sketch—a plan which was probably drafted some time in the 'fifties, as it repeats the reference to bad taste prevailing before Spenser which was rephrased to indicate a more neutral approach in the 1762 edition. Clarissa Rinaker comments that this draft is probably for the first volume as it was originally planned. The first item—the plan is again chronological in outline—refers to the Druids and Bards; the second to ‘Pierce Plowman’ as ‘the first Allegorical Poem in our Tongue’; in the third Warton describes how ‘The Allegoric inventive Vein seem'd in a little time to be lost’; fourth comes the revival of learning and the rise of polished verse with Wyatt and Surrey; lastly, ‘A fine harvest of Poësy now shew'd itself in Q. Elizabeth's reign’.

IX

In 1770 Gray wrote, at Hurd's request, to Warton, who was by this time far advanced in his preparation of the first volume, offering his own sketch of a history and enquiring whether it corresponded with anything in Warton's own approach:⁷

few of your friends have been better pleased than I, to find this subject, surely neither unentertaining nor unuseful, had fallen into hands so likely to do it justice; few have felt a higher esteem for your talents, your taste, and industry.

Gray's scheme is based on Pope's, which had appeared in Ruffhead's Life in 1769. It introduces the subject with a survey of Gothic and Saxon poetry. Gray bases his account on the assumption that there were different schools of poets, first, that of Provence to which Chaucer and his successors belonged; the second, the Italian school, which in turn influenced the lyric poetry of Surrey and his contemporaries. Next, in a fourth section, he deals with

Spenser, his character: subject of his poem, allegoric and romantic, or Provençal invention; but his manner of tracing it borrowed from the second Italian School.—Drayton, Fairfax, Phineas Fletcher, Golding, Phaer, &c. This school ends in Milton.—A third Italian school, full of conceit, begun in Queen Elizabeth's reign, continued under James and Charles the First, by Donne, Crashaw, Cleveland, carried to its height by Cowley, and ending perhaps in Sprat.

PART V

School of France, introduced after the Restoration—Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, and Pope—which has continued to our own times.

Walpole felt after reading Warton's History that Gray's plan had not been superseded and would have been far superior; and although Warton is writing after completing only the first volume it is obvious that this more systematic approach in terms of schools, influences and kinds of writing might have produced a more satisfactory treatment of the ways in which writing poetry in English had developed. Warton replied in a letter which raises points of considerable interest, while revealing his complete lack of grasp of the overall structuring his material would require:⁸

Although I have not followed the plan, yet it is of great service to me, and throws light on many of my periods by giving connected views and details. I begin with such an introduction or general dissertation as you had intended, viz. on the Northern Poetry, with its introduction into England by the Danes and Saxons, and its duration. I then begin my history of the Conquest, which I write chronologically in sections, and continue as matter successively offers itself, in a series of regular annals, down to and beyond the Restoration. I think with you that dramatic poetry is detached from the idea of my work, that it requires a separate consideration and will swell the size of my book beyond all bounds. One of my sections, a very large one, is entirely on Chaucer, and will almost make my first volume, for I design two volumes in quarto. This first volume will soon be in the press. I should have said before that though I proceed chronologically, yet I often stand still to give some general view, as perhaps of a particular species of poetry, etc., and even anticipate sometimes for this purpose. These views often form one section, yet are interwoven with the tenor of the work, without interrupting my historical series. In this respect some of my sections have the effect of your parts or divisions.

The first three outlines of his survey show that what the letter to Gray implies has indeed happened. Warton is not so much concerned with historical developments in poetry, but with charting the fortunes of a type of poetry—that allegorical and inventive vein—which had for him the greatest appeal. His grounds for not employing the schemes of Pope or Gray he later enlarged on:

To confess the real truth, upon examination and experiment, I soon discovered their mode of treating my subject, plausible as it is and brilliant in theory, to be attended with difficulties and inconveniences. … Like other ingenious systems, it sacrifices much useful intelligence to the observance of arrangement; and in the place of that satisfaction, which arises from a clearness and a fulness of information, seemed only to substitute the merit of disposition, and the praise of contrivance. The constraint imposed by a mechanical attention to this distribution, appeared to me to destroy that free exertion of research, with which such a history ought to be executed, and not easily reconcileable with that complication, variety, and extent of materials, which it ought to comprehend.

(Mant [The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, B.D., edited by Richard Mant], i, lxii-iii)

Warton's chief concern is not with standards or theories, but with research into, and making his readers acquainted with, the chief elements in that vein of poetic inspiration which had helped to produce England's greatest national poets. And this in consequence would improve the taste of his time.

X

Warton's plan for the Observations is based on an acceptance of current tools of analysis—the ways in which the author to be considered has imitated the work of his predecessors; the relationship between his style and his subject; and the chief characteristics of his poetry—in this case the allegorical. Spenser's indebtedness to the classical and Italian poets had received consideration from Warton's predecessors, Hughes and Upton. But, as Johnson noted in the letter I quoted earlier, Warton realised that a mass of popular romance and ballad material had been accessible to the poet. Employing therefore, an already accepted method of investigation Warton opened fresh perspectives of knowledge and established a new kind of relevance for popular literature and for the researches of the antiquarians.

For after establishing Spenser's indebtedness to the manners of chivalry and the literature of romance in section 10, ‘Of Spenser's Allegorical Character’, Warton goes on to mention the effects of public entertainments of his time on the invention of the allegory:

Nor is it sufficiently consider'd, that a prevalent practice of Spenser's age contributed in a very considerable degree to make him an Allegorical Poet. It should be remember'd that, in the age of which we are speaking, allegory was the subject and foundation of public shews and spectacles, which were then exhibited with a magnificence superior to that of former times; that the vices and virtues personify'd and represented by living actors, distinguish'd with their representative emblematical types, were generally introduc'd to constitute Pageantries, which were then the principal entertainments, and shewn not only in private, and upon the stage, but very frequently in the open streets, for solemnising any public occasion.

(pp. 217-18)

Warton refers to Holinshed's description of the ‘Shew of Manhood and Desert’ at Norwich, and of a ‘Turney’ at Westminster. He draws the conclusion that ‘Spenser's manner of allegorizing seems to have rather resulted from some of the spectacles just-mention'd, than from what he had red in Ariosto’. The researches of the antiquarian are demonstrated as necessary to a true understanding of the fabric of what was becoming more clearly recognisable as a complex and broad national literary heritage.

Warton points out that Spenser uses the allegory as a moral vehicle in the manner of Ariosto in book 1, but that his characteristic method is different from Ariosto's:

In fact, Ariosto's species of Allegory does not so much consist in impersonating the virtues, vices, and affections of the mind, as in the adumbration of moral doctrine, under the actions of men and women. On this plan Spenser's allegories are sometimes formed: as in the first book, where the Red-crosse Knight or a True Christian … defeats the wiles of Archimago, or the Devil, &c.

(pp. 219-20)

And he adds a footnote:

It is observed by Plutarch, that ‘Allegory is that, in which one thing is related and another understood’. Thus Ariosto Relates the adventures of Orlando, Rogero, Bradamante, &c. by which is Understood the conquest of the passions, the importance of virtue, and other moral doctrines; on which account we may call the Orlando a Moral poem; but can we call the Fairy Queen upon the whole a Moral poem? is it not equally an Historical or Political poem? For though it may be, according to it's author's words, an Allegory or Dark Conceit, yet that which is couched or understood under this allegory is the history, and intrigues, of queen Elizabeth's courtiers; which however are introduced with a Moral design.

(p. 219 n.)

For Warton the allegory of Spenser is peculiarly rich and abundant: it is not merely a narration which can be given interpretative gloss—as Plutarch had defined allegory and as Ariosto had practised it. Nourished on the pageantry and romance literature of his time, Spenser's imagination, peculiarly susceptible, like that of all great artists, to the dominant modes of statement of his age, became steeped in symbolic forms of expression so that his poetry was not a direct representation but an imaginative transformation of the experience available to him. In this Warton's approach to Spenser resembles his observations on the excellence of Theocritus as compared to Virgil in the pastoral. The details of either allegory or pastoral are so presented that an ideal world is rendered real to the imagination of the reader. The tension between form and subject is resolved without, as in Ariosto or Virgil, the importance of the formal concerns dominating the experience offered by the poem. This is achieved by combining the natural representation of particularised and concrete detail to suggest the texture of real life to the reader with the formal structuring of that experience to produce a significant whole. And as the very use of allegorical form guarantees the intention on the poet's part of conveying to the reader some general, abstract truth, so the form or forms in which the allegory is cast may employ all the fantastic and beguiling creativity of the poet without the validity of a central theme being undermined, any more than the ebullient fantastic forms of Gothic architecture detracted from the awareness of the intention with which the building had been erected. The mind is led to ponder on the general theme by being alerted to responsiveness by local and specific details which the poet depicts.

It will be remembered that Warton sees a decline in poetry as ‘Poets began … to be more attentive to words than to things and objects’. Following on the references to the indebtedness of Spenser to the spectacles and entertainments he saw for his allegory, Warton makes an important statement about the relationship between poetry and reality, beginning, it is true, conventionally enough:

he [Spenser] has shewn himself a much more ingenious allegorist, where his Imagination Bodies forth unsubstantial things, Turns them to Shape, and marks out the nature, powers, and effects of that which is ideal and abstracted, by visible and external symbols; as in his delineation of Fear, Envy, Fancy, Despair, and the like. Ariosto gives us but few of these symbolical beings, in comparison of Spenser; and those which he has given us, are by no means drawn with that fullness and distinctness with which they are painted by the latter. And that Spenser painted these figures so fully and distinctly, may we not reasonably attribute it, to his being so frequently habituated to the sight of these symbolical beings, distinguished with their proper emblems, and actually endued with speech, motion, and life?

(p. 220)

The principle is the same as that employed when he referred to the impact of Gothic architecture on the youthful imagination of Milton. It follows that Spenser's failures and inconsistencies—to which an entire section of the Observations is devoted—are not Warton's central concern. His chief interest is in showing how the poet's mind was so furnished that it could excel in true poetry. And it was the conditions in the age of Elizabeth which had produced the fine harvest of poetry to which he refers in his outline sketch for History.

XI

In his account of Early English Stages, 1300-1576 (1959), Glynne Wickham considers the modes of statement inherent in experience offered by the pageant theatres which were erected in the streets of a city to welcome a royal visitor:

The nature of their content was sermon, spectacular and dramatic, the significance of which was specifically directed at the visitor but which the occasion caused author, actors and audience to share alike. In consequence of all these facts, thematic content took precedence over everything else in the construction of both text and spectacle. Where topical subject matter was inevitably of so personal a kind, courtesy, if nothing else, forbade bald statement. Instead, it suggested allegorical treatment. This could be scriptural, historical, mythological or whatever best fitted the occasion and justifies the remarks which Warton made in his History of English Poetry and which I quote in full since they appear to have sustained such unwarrantable neglect from subsequent historians of our drama:

‘It seems probable that the Pageants, which being shown on civil occasions, derived great part of their decoration and actors from historical fact, and consequently made profane characters the subject of public exhibition, dictated ideas of a regular drama much sooner that the Mysteries; which being confined to scripture stories, or rather the legendary miracles of sainted martyrs, and the no less ideal personifications of the christian virtues, were not calculated to make so quick and easy a transition to the representations of real life and rational action.’

(pp. 62-3)

The variety of allegorical modes available, to which Professor Wickham refers, was related to Spenser's allegorising by Warton in the passage which I have already quoted from the Observations. The closer the parallel to actual existence for the reader, the more flexible the modes of treatment of that reality available to the writer. It was historical fact that mattered:

Witches were thought really to exist in the age of Queen Elizabeth, and our author had, probably, been struck with seeing such a cottage as this, in which a witch was supposed to live. Those who have perus'd Mr. Blackwall's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, will be best qualified to judge how much better enabled that poet is to describe, who copies from living objects, than he who describes, in a later age, from tradition.

(p. 267)

Warton's motivation in assembling the ‘mass of raw materials which Scott saw as preliminary to writing a history’ rather than as itself constituting the History of English Poetry, is, then, to accumulate evidences of a tradition of true poetry and the conditions of the ages from which it emerged. So in the second edition of the Observations he concludes an account of the decorations of various buildings with the sudden remark:

Taste and imagination make more antiquarians, than the world is willing to allow. One looks back with romantic pleasure on the arts and fashions of an age, which

Employ'd the power of fairy hands.

(ii, 234)

—a quotation from Gray which emphasises the bond of antiquarian enthusiasm which they shared.

XII

It is characteristic of Warton that from an apparently commonplace standpoint he arrives at a surprising delicacy and subtlety of insight. The material available to the poet is of course modified by his characteristic responses to his environment. So in the section rather unpromisingly headed ‘Of Spenser's Imitations of Himself’, we have first the commonsense assertion that while the tracing of borrowings from other authors which Warton had dealt with so far is

a business which proceeds upon an uncertain foundation, affording the amusement of conjecture rather than the satisfaction of truth; it may perhaps be a more serviceable undertaking, to produce an author's Imitations of Himself: and this will be more particularly useful in the three following respects, viz. It will discover the Favorite Images of an author; it will teach us how Variously he expresses the same thought; and it will often Explain Difficult passages, and words.

(p. 181)

From a discussion of various passages he concludes that Spenser ‘particularly excels in painting affright, confusion, and astonishment’. But Warton does not rest content with this generalisation. The poetry of Spenser conveys to him a certain quality of mind of the author, providing indeed a clue to that bent of disposition which causes the poet to dwell on certain kinds of experience and intensities of feeling. Of the account of Despair in book 1 Warton remarks:

It is a trite observation, that we paint that best, which we have felt most. Spenser's whole life seems to have consisted of disappointments and distress; so that he probably was not unacquainted with the bitter agonies of a despairing mind, which the warmth of his imagination, and, what was its consequence, his sensibility of temper contributed to render doubly severe. Unmerited and unpitied indigence ever struggles hardest with true genius; and a good taste, for the same reasons that it enhances the pleasures of life, sustains with uncommon tortures the miseries of that state, in which (says an incomparable moralist) ‘every virtue is obscured, and in which no conduct can avoid reproach; a state in which cheerfulness is insensibility, and dejection sullenness, of which the hardships are without honour, and the labours without reward’.

(pp. 193-4)

But while each bent of the creative mind is different, and poets may suffer in a variety of ways, the prospects offered by antiquarianism are limitless and, given Warton's assumptions, invariably rewarding. For him the unfolding of a History of Poetry will inevitably be an investigation into the records of the past combined with responsiveness to that poetry which delights him most and this will be intermingled with antiquarian digression and extensive transcription.

XIII

In the preface to his History Warton shows above all a sense of his obligation to his public:

We look back on the savage conditions of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority; we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance: and our reflections on this subject are accompanied with a conscious pride, arising in great measure from a tacit comparison between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our present improvements in knowledge.

But, none the less, to appreciate present achievements it is necessary to gain insight into the manners of the past:

to develop the dawnings of genius, and to pursue the progress of our national poetry, from a rude origin and obscure beginnings, to its perfection in a polished age, must prove an interesting and instructive investigation. But a history of poetry, for another reason, yet on the same principles, must be more especially productive of entertainment and utility. I mean, as it is an art, whose object is human society: as it has the peculiar merit, in its operations on that object, of faithfully recording the features of the times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive representations of manners.

(pp. ii-iii)

So although the overt aim of the work is to improve his readers' knowledge of the past, and extend their awareness of present achievements and past ways of life, of different modes of thinking and feeling, Warton soon discloses in discussing his plan where the main emphasis of his work is to lie. He refers to his decision not to employ the schemes of Gray or Pope on the grounds that:

The constraint imposed by a mechanical attention to this distribution (of materials in Schools) appeared to me to destroy that free exertion of research with which such a history ought to be executed, and not easily reconcilable with that complication, variety, and extent of materials, which it ought to comprehend.

The method I have pursued, on one account at least, seems preferable to all others. My performance, in its present form, exhibits without transposition the gradual improvements of our poetry, at the same time as it uniformly presents the progression of our language.

(p. v)

Unlike Gray he feels that the drama cannot properly be excluded: though it can only of necessity be given a subordinate place in his account, yet ‘I flatter myself … that from evidences hitherto unexplored, I have recovered hints which may facilitate the labours of those, who shall hereafter be inclined to investigate the antient state of dramatic exhibition in this country, with due comprehension and accuracy’ (p. vii). He defends himself in advance against accusations of prolixity in quotation: ‘it should be remembered, that most of these are extracted from antient manuscript poems never before printed, and hitherto but little known. Nor was it easy to illustrate the darker and more distant period of our poetry without producing ample specimens.’

In the mean time, I hope to merit the thanks of the antiquarian, for enriching the stock of our early literature by these new accessions: and I trust I shall gratify the reader of taste, in having so frequently rescued from oblivion the rude inventions and irregular beauties of the heroic tale, or the romantic legend.

(p. viii)

The purpose of the History as he sees it at the beginning is to unearth discoveries, not to pursue an overall interpretation. It is not surprising that over a quarter of the first volume (the pages are not numbered) should consist of the two digressions which Warton asserts will consider ‘some material points of a general and preliminary nature’, and will at the same time ‘endeavour to establish certain fundamental principles to which frequent appeals might occasionally be made, and to clear the way for various observations arising in the course of my future enquiries’. The two digressions are ‘On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe’ and ‘On the Introduction of Learning into England’. These two topics serve to indicate, as Warton claims, his main lines of investigation.

XIV

Whereas Percy had opened the Reliques with an account of the importance of the minstrels, Warton is concerned with the ways in which the fantasies of the romantic imagination reached Europe. The interpretation offered by Warburton, which had relied on the impact of the Saracens on the Spanish culture, was undermined by Percy's investigations into the dating of Spanish romance material. Warton quickly arrives at the fund of legend held in common by Celtic speakers: the stories of Wales and Brittany strongly resemble one another. Consequently on the fourth page of his Dissertation he observes that Milton ‘mentions indiscriminately’ the knights of Wales and Armorica as the customary retinue of king Arthur:

                                        —What resounds
In fable or romance, of Uther's son
Begirt with British and Armoric knights'.

He refers to Ossian as evidence of the intermingling of different influences:

It is indeed very remarkable, that in these poems the terrible graces, which so naturally characterise, and so generally constitute, the early poetry of barbarous people, should so frequently give way to a gentler set of manners, to the social sensibilities of polished life, and a more civilised and elegant species of imagination. Nor is this circumstance, which disarranges all our established ideas concerning the savage stages of society, easily to be accounted for, unless we suppose, that the Celtic tribes, who were so strongly addicted to poetical composition, and who made it so much their duty from the earliest times, might by degrees have attained a higher vein of poetical refinement, than could at first sight or on common principles be expected among nations, whom we are accustomed to call barbarous; that some few instances of an elevated strain of friendship, of love, and other sentimental feelings, existing in such nations, might lay the foundations for introducing a set of manners among the bards, more refined and exalted than the real manners of the country; and that panegyrics on those virtues, transmitted with improvements from bard to bard, must at length have formed characters of ideal excellence, which might propagate among the people real manners bordering on the poetical.

He cites Blair's defence of Ossian, and refers (in a note) with some respect to Macpherson's. But Warton is mainly concerned with establishing relationships between early literatures in which a love of the marvellous and supernatural is manifested. So he proceeds:

These poems, however, notwithstanding the difference between the Gothic and the Celtic rituals, contain many visible vestiges of Scandinavian superstition. The allusions in the songs of Ossian to spirits, who preside over the different parts and direct the various operations of nature … entirely correspond with the Runic system, and breathe the spirit of its poetry.

In support of this he cites instances from Olaus Wormius and Olaus Magnus, as well as from Bartholin's De Contemptu Mortis apud Daniis, and the ‘Hervarer Saga’. Tacitus joins Diodorus Siculus and Joannes Aventinus, Posidonius and Aelian in notes to support Warton's assertions concerning the subject matter of Scandinavian poetry. The giants, dragons and fairies on the other hand are attributed to Arabian influence, and their absence from the poems of Ossian is for Warton ‘a striking proof of their antiquity’. The work of Evans is cited in confirmation of the absence of fantastic marvels of this kind from the productions of the ancient Welsh bards. And so he comes to his conclusion:

Amid the gloom of superstition, in an age of the grossest ignorance and credulity, a taste for the wonders of Oriental fiction was introduced by the Arabians into Europe, many countries of which were already seasoned to a reception of its extravagancies, by means of the poetry of the Gothic scalds, who perhaps originally derived their ideas from the same fruitful region of invention. These fictions, coinciding with the reigning manners, and perpetually kept up and improved in the tales of troubadours and ministrels, seem to have centred about the eleventh century in the ideal histories of Turpin and Geoffrey of Monmouth, which record the suppositious achievements of Charlemagne and King Arthur, where they formed the ground-work of that species of fabulous narrative called romance. And from these beginnings, or causes, afterwards enlarged and enriched by kindred fancies fetched from the crusades, that singular and capricious mode of imagination arose, which at length composed the marvellous machineries of the more sublime Italian poets, and of their disciple Spenser.

The climax of fine fablings is exemplified in Spenser, so that control of the imagination by the judgment which is necessitated for the advance of society and the improvement of civilised life is achieved through the acquisition of wisdom. Hence the second dissertation deals, sequentially, with the introduction of learning into England.

Warton traces here the impact of the barbarian invasions on the Roman civilisation, the incursion of the Gothic disorder into Roman ‘peace and civility’. But not only did the Goths have the opportunity to acquire some degree of wisdom from their conquests: Warton observes that

Their enemies have been their historians, who naturally painted these violent disturbers of the general repose in the warmest colours. It is not easy to conceive, that the success of their amazing enterprizes was merely the effect of numbers and tumultuary depredation. … Superior strength and courage must have contributed in a considerable degree to their rapid and extensive conquests; but at the same time, such mighty achievements could not have been planned and executed without some extraordinary vigour of mind, uniform principles of conduct, and no common talents of political sagacity.

Meantime Latin poetry had lapsed into barbarism—‘From the growing increase of christianity, it was deprived of its old fabulous embellishments, and chiefly employed in composing ecclesiastical hymns.’ In monasteries, however, the spark of knowledge was kept alive, and with increasing stability libraries began to grow and learning again to flourish. Warton's attitude towards his material is shown when he considers the work of Bede: ‘It is diverting’, he writes, referring to the Mélanges d'Histoire et de Littérature (Paris, 1725) of ‘Monsieur de Vigneul Marville’,

to see the French critics censuring Bede for credulity: they might as well have accused him of superstition. … He has recorded but few civil transactions: but besides that his history professedly considers ecclesiastical affairs, we should remember, that the building of a church, the preferment of an abbot, the canonisation of a martyr, and the importation into England of the shinbone of an apostle, were necessarily matters of much more importance in Bede's conceptions than histories or revolutions. He is fond of minute descriptions; but particularities are the fault and often the merit of early historians.

And earlier:

His knowledge, if we consider his age, was extensive and profound: and it is amazing, in so rude a period, and during a life of no considerable length, he should have made so successful a progress, and such rapid improvements, in scientific and philological studies, and have composed so many elaborate treatises on different subjects.

The deployment of an historical imagination is characteristic of Warton's best work. Again, in the conclusion to the Dissertation, he insists on the ways in which civilising influences may not necessarily foster the growth of a civilising literature. In the medieval period he sees in the growth of civil and canonical laws an encouragement to pedantry and casuistry in the universities, where jurisprudence ‘was treated with the same spirit of idle speculation which had been carried into philosophy and theology, it was overwhelmed with endless commentaries which disclaimed all elegance of language, and served only to exercise genius, as it afforded materials for framing the flimsy labyrinths of casuistry.’ But, in any case, in spite of an increase of learning:

The habits of superstition and ignorance were as yet too powerful for a reformation of this kind to be affected by a few polite scholars. It was necessary that many circumstances and events, yet in the womb of time, should take place, before the minds of men could be so far enlightened as to receive these improvements.

And he returns to his main theme before beginning the History proper:

But perhaps inventive poetry lost nothing by this relapse. Had classical taste and judgment been now established, imagination would have suffered, and too early a check would have been given to the beautiful extravagancies of romantic fabling. In a word, truth and reason would have chased before their time those spectres of illusive fancy, so pleasing to the imagination, which delight to hover in the gloom of ignorance and superstition, and which form so considerable a part of the poetry of the succeeding centuries.

XV

The experience of reading the History has been variously described as ‘wading rather than reading’ and as being guided by the ‘torch of genius through ruins in which he [Warton] loves to wander’. The grounds for such apparently conflicting verdicts should by now have become clear. For Gibbon the History combined ‘the taste of a poet with the minute diligence of an antiquarian’:⁹ and whereas the concern of the poet is with that poetry of the past which advanced the art of verse and at the same time awakened the imaginative response of the modern reader, the business of the antiquarian is with the reproduction of obscure material which illuminated the life of the past in which those poets wrote. It is the critic or man of taste who attempts to unite both interests, and this role of Warton's as professor and Poet Laureate is too often forgotten. Warton places his concern with poetry and manners, however, before any questioning of critical assumptions. It is on this account that his work suffers from a lack of discrimination between poets of very different levels of achievement but at the same time and for the same reason benefits from what is essentially a free exertion of research. In the infancy of historical accounts of poetry it was of greater importance to extend the imaginative awareness of the reader than to utter precepts and demarcate schools and influences and traditions.

Warton employs the greater part of his first volume in quoting from various romances of chivalry, and in giving accounts of contemporary pageants and miracle plays. He proceeds to Piers Plowman and Langland's use of personification and allegory, then to Chaucer, whose work marks at once the advent of pathos into literature and of some elegance and refinement into the vernacular. The lengthy appreciation devoted to Chaucer and the comparison of his work with that of his originals serves to emphasise the national genius of the poet and offers the best criticism of his work since Dryden.

But the expectations which were aroused by the first volume were not answered by the second. Although he begins with a valuable account of Gower, Occleve and Lydgate, emphasising considerations of style, dwelling appreciatively on passages of natural description and noting any indebtedness to romance material, Warton goes on to a protracted and detailed account of fifteenth-century translations from the classics into French and English, from Harding and the Lives of the Saints to Hawes, Skelton, the Scottish poets and the moralities and mysteries, with a digression on the acting of plays in schools and universities. It is disappointing that the Renaissance is described almost entirely in terms of the revival of learning, the increase in translations, the endowment of schools and colleges (material which Warton had employed in his lives of Pope and Bathurst), so that any element of exposition is buried beneath a mass of recorded detail. Vast tracts of this volume disappointed Warton's contemporaries by their dullness:

The learned and ingenious Writer [comments the Monthly reviewer] has prosecuted his respectable labours with great assiduity, but, possibly, with too much prolixity. On that account only it is to be feared that his valuable book may become the solitary inhabitant of consulted libraries … there is to certain minds a charm in the investigation of antiquity, which is not easily dissolved: and it is no wonder if, in tracing the progress of ancient genius, a writer whose pursuits have been congenial with his subject, should loiter in the fairy region through which he passes.

(lix, 132)

XVI

The principal interest of this volume, however, was the lengthy dissertation on the Rowley poems. For although Warton goes so far as to say that if they were indeed authentic they might be considered to have redeemed the poetic reputation of the fifteenth century, he states at the beginning of his account that ‘there are some circumstances which incline us to suspect these pieces to be a modern forgery’ (p. 139). The sensitivity to different poetic modes of statement which was present in the comments on Ossian quoted earlier, is now brought to bear on the different aspects of Chatterton's forgeries. The Epistle prefixed to The Tragedy of Aella commends ‘Some Great Story of Human Manners’, as most suitable for theatrical presentation. But, says Warton:

this idea is the result of that taste and discrimination, which could only belong to a more advanced period of society.

But, above all, the cast of thought, the complexion of the sentiments, and the structure of the composition evidently prove these pieces not antient.

(pp. 155-6)

And if the obsolete language be offered as proof:

As to his knowledge of the old English literature, which is rarely the study of a young poet, a sufficient quantity of obsolete words and phrases were readily attainable from the glossary to Chaucer, and to Percy's Ballads. It is confessed, that this youth wrote the Execution of Sir Charles Bawdwin: and he who could forge that poem, might easily forge all the rest.

(p. 157)

Warton does not allow his sensibility to the poetry to distract him from the application of standards of scholarship. He concludes:

It is with regret that I find myself obliged to pronounce Rowlie's poems to be spurious. Antient remains of English poetry, unexpectedly discovered, and fortunately rescued from a long oblivion, are contemplated with a degree of fond enthusiasm: exclusive of any real or intrinsic excellence, they afford those pleasures, arising from the idea of antiquity which deeply interest the imagination. With these pleasures we are unwilling to part. But there is a more solid satisfaction, resulting from the detection of artifice and imposture.

(p. 164)

Warton's Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Rowley Poems was published in 1782, and here his rigorous analysis of their forgeries was part of a defence of his standards of scholarship against the attacks of Joseph Ritson and others. He affirms roundly that if the Rowley poems are not established finally as forgeries ‘the entire system that has hitherto been framed concerning the progression of poetical composition, and every theory that has been established on the gradual improvements of taste, style, and language, will be shaken and disarranged’ (p. 8).

Earlier in the Enquiry Warton discusses the charges levelled against his scholarship by his critics, and compares them to ‘the unexpected retort of Curll the bookseller, who being stigmatised by Pope for having been ignominiously tossed in a blanket, seriously declared he was not tossed in a blanket but in a rug’ (p. 5). In his edition of Pope's Works Bowles remarks of Thomas Warton: ‘So sweet was his temper, and so remote from pageantry and all affectation was his conduct, that when even Ritson's scurrilous abuse came out, in which he asserted that his [Warton's] back was “broad enough, and his heart hard enough” to bear any thing Ritson could lay on it, he only said, with his usual smile, “A black letter'd dog, sir”’ (vi, 325).

Although Warton did not question the authenticity of Ossian in print, there is some suggestion in the manner of his references to the poems in the Dissertation that their authenticity is not beyond all doubt. And among the Trinity College MSS. is a fragment headed ‘Doubts &c. about Ossian’. Under this heading are arranged the following items: ‘1. That there should be no religious Idea or Image—2. That there should be such Sentiments of Humanity—3. Such Taste of Beauty.—4. Similes—5. General imagery. 6. Savages are not so struck with their wild scenes— … as to describe them [MS. in part indecipherable] and to think them strange—To persons accustomed to politer life they are only strange. 7. Tradition in all Countries imperfect.’ Professor Wellek judged the comments on Ossian in the Dissertation to be an unfortunate lapse on Warton's part, but the MS. goes a long way to supporting Walpole's assumption that Warton was here being merely civil—probably to Blair whose Dissertation in defence of the poems had appeared in 1763.

XVII

Warton's History was edited twice in the nineteenth century; by Price in 1824 and by William Carew Hazlitt, the grandson of the essayist and critic in 1871. His editors find the History deficient not only in its lack of plan, but in its omission of authors who should have been included, and in its textual inaccuracies: Carew Hazlitt remarks: ‘From a careful comparison of many of Warton's quotations with the very originals to which he refers, one can only draw the conclusion that he considered the faithful representation of texts as a matter of very subordinate consequence’ (pp. x-xi). The books which Warton has conveniently seen in the library of ‘the late Mr. William Collins’ have ‘been dispersed’—never to be located more. The account of a Christmas feast given by Queen Mary and King Philip of Spain for Princess Elizabeth which enlivened Warton's Life of Sir Thomas Pope was probably a more serious lapse from scholarly standards, as it seems possible that Warton forged the document from which he is supposed to have derived the information or that he took its authenticity too easily for granted.¹⁰ But as Warton's methods of work were spasmodic and slovenly—as his brother found when seeking material for the completion of the History after his death—errors both trivial and serious were likely to have occurred when Warton was dealing with such areas of material.

The structural weaknesses in the History reach their climax in the third volume. Here a dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum as the origin of many of the tales and legends of English romance fiction heralds consideration of the work of Surrey. An account of More is interrupted for a twenty-five-page quotation from the romance of Ywain and Gawain; and Warton seems to find a certain relief in quoting at length the drinking song from Gammer Gurton's Needle at the conclusion of a section on the versifying of the Psalms. The allegorical effectiveness of Sackville's Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates is dwelt on at some length. The History ends with a general view of the reign of Elizabeth ‘as the most Poetical age of these annals’ (p. 490), stressing the abundance of fable, fiction and fancy not only in native literature but also in translation from the classical and Italian writers: these are related to the spirit and manners of the times. Learning was beginning to advance, so that:

On the whole, we were now arrived at 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 judgment, and when taste and learning had so far only disciplined imagination, as to suffer its excesses to pass without censure or control, for the sake of the beauties to which they were allied.

(p. 501)

It is a conventional enough ending, and its tone is more final than Warton's plan, ‘a conspectus of poetry from the Conquest to the Revolution’, would have implied. Warton had appeared to Percy to be fatigued with his researches in the 'sixties, and the various undertakings, classical, antiquarian and local historical, find their place in the History itself, accounting for some at least of the otherwise irresponsibly digressive pattern of the work. Indeed parts of the Life of Bathurst were to be used to eke out the notes on Milton's minor poems. Passages in the third volume of the History are taken, often word for word and quite irrelevantly, from the text of the Life of Sir Thomas Pope.

XVIII

But against these weaknesses in Warton's History must be set its status as a pioneering work in taste and criticism, and one which bears the authenticity of a sensitively apprehended view of poetry. He shows himself aware of treading much of the ground for the first time, and, as he supposed, the last. Of the Pricke of Conscience he remarked, ‘I prophecy that I am its last transcriber’ (i, 256). Conscious of his too frequent and copious use of quotation he wrote:

It is neither my inclination nor intention to write a catalogue, or compile a miscellany. It is not to be expected that this work should be a general repository of our ancient poetry: I cannot, however, help observing, that English literature and English poetry suffer, while so many pieces of this kind [he is referring to Sir Bevys] still remain concealed and forgotten in our manuscript libraries.

(i, 207-8)

He was reading many of the manuscripts for the first time for centuries: it is no wonder that his treatment of them was unequal. Ker pointed out that Warton had unfortunately missed the Gawain and Pearl MSS; but in fact, although Gawain is not dealt with in the History, an extract from Pearl is quoted as if it had been transcribed and inserted from the catalogue description (iii, 107n). Errors in transcription might be numerous, and glossing faulty, but when one looks at his appreciation of Gavin Douglas's prologue to the sixth book of his translation of the Aeneid, one sees in his selection a critical attitude of permanent value. ‘The several books’, he says, ‘are introduced with metrical prologues, which are often highly poetical; and shew that Douglas's proper walk was original poetry’ (p. 282). He quotes for nearly seven pages the charming description of May, and observes:

The poetical beauties of this specimen will be relished by every reader who is fond of lively touches of fancy, and rural imagery. But the verses will have another merit with those critics who love to contemplate the progress of composition, and to mark the original workings of genuine nature; as they are the effusion of a mind not overlaid by the descriptions of other poets, but operating, by its own force and bias, in the delineation of a vernal landscape, on such subjects as really occurred.

So he renders the passage into modern English. Again, there is the admiration for Sackville's Induction:

These shadowy inhabitants of hell-gate are conceived with the vigour of a creative imagination, and described with great force of expression. They are delineated with that fulness of proportion, that invention of picturesque attributes, distinctness, animation, and amplitude, of which Spenser is commonly supposed to have given the first specimens in our language, and which are characteristical of his poetry.

(p. 233)

The influence of Dante, hitherto generally regarded as a ‘Gothic’ poet, is seen in the greater licence given to extravagances of description; comparing Dante with Virgil:

It must be allowed, that the scenes of Virgil's sixth book have many fine strokes of the terrible. But Dante's colouring is of a more gloomy temperature. There is a sombrous cast in his imagination: and he has given new shades of horror to the classical hell. We may say of Dante, that

          Hell
Grows Darker at his Frown.—

The sensations of fear impressed by the Roman poet are less harrassing to the repose of the mind: they have a more equable and placid effect. The terror of Virgil's tremendous objects is diminished by correctness of composition and elegance of style. We are reconciled to his Gorgons and Hydras, by the grace of expression, and the charms of versification.

(p. 254)

The repudiation of formal statement as in itself a desirable end for the artist to perfect is here given concrete expression in criticism; the responsiveness of reader and poet alike is roused more by Dante than Virgil: ‘the Charms which we so much admire in Dante, do not belong to the Greeks and Romans. They are derived from another origin and must be traced back to a different stock’ (p. 255). So the characters over the gate of brass in the Inferno, quoted and translated by Warton, impress by the ‘severe solemnity in these abrupt and comprehensive sentences, and they are a striking preparation to the scenes that follow. But the idea of such an inscription on the brazen portal of hell, was suggested to Dante by books of chivalry; in which the gate of an impregnable enchanted castle, is often inscribed with words importing the dangers or wonders to be found within’ (p. 239).

XIX

The ease and breadth of reference, the absence of any prejudice and preconception to impede the responsiveness of the writer to the poetry he is discovering to his public, remain Warton's major contribution to the writing of literary history. As Chalmers observed, the magnitude of the undertaking exceeded the original idea. He praised the digressions for the wealth of information they contained. Warton, he wrote:

was the first who taught the true method of acquiring a taste for the excellencies of our ancient poets, and of rescuing their writings from obscurity and oblivion. Of Warton it may be said as of Addison; ‘he is now despised by some who perhaps would never have seen his defects, but by the lights which he afforded them’. His erudition was extensive, and his industry must have been at one time incessant. The references in his History of Poetry only, indicate a course of varied reading, collation, and transcription, to which the common life of man seems insufficient. He was one of those scholars who have happily rescued the study of antiquities from the reproaches of the frivolous or indolent. Amidst the most rugged tracks of ancient lore, he produces cultivated spots, flowery paths, and gay prospects.

(p. 85)

His successor, Courthope, deplored that Warton set about his work in the spirit of an antiquary, though he allowed that ‘his reading was wide, his scholarship sound, his taste fine and discriminating; and though he had no pretensions to be called a great poet, his verse is at least marked by genuine poetic sensibility’ (ix, xii). But these qualities enabled Warton to keep the relationship between the reader and the writer paramount when discussing poetry, and to widen the historical approach and the perspectives of the imagination accordingly in opening up tracts of early literature and manners to his contemporaries. And when Eliot could write, not so very long ago, about alliteration ‘as primitive as that of Piers Plowman’, Warton's subtler approach to medieval literature retains an intrinsic importance even in the twentieth century.

XX

Of all the attempts which have been made to express the essential character of Warton's achievement, that which regards him as a precursor of Romanticism is plainly inadequate, as, indeed, is that which sees him, conversely, as an essentially Augustan figure. Nichol Smith's suggestion that Warton found in the romances a relief from the classics fails to explain why Warton was so preoccupied with early literature, and, more important, the critical standpoint which dominated the greater part of his writings. R. D. Havens saw Warton as a transitional figure of purely historical significance:¹¹

The truth of Warton's opinions does not matter but their inconsistencies and other limitations do. We read the Observations and the ‘Verses on Reynolds's Window’, not for light on the Faerie Queene or on Gothic architecture, but on a subject about which we know much less,—the mid eighteenth century. If we are ever to understand this period, it will be through a careful study of such typical figures as Thomas Warton, a study, not only of their successes, but of their failures, a study which does not overlook their conventionality and conservatism in its search for originality and liberalism. Such a study will convince us of the impossibility of tagging the writers of the time as ‘romantic’ or ‘classic’.

The statement is a just one, but in the assumption on which it rests it defeats the true end of studying literary history—the only one which makes it of living interest—that, namely, to attempt, however imperfectly, to interpret the spirit in which the Wartons approached the problems and responsibilities of interpreting and assessing their literary inheritance.

In his last work, that on Milton's minor poems, Warton wrote of his subject:

Smit with the deplorable polemics of puritanism, he suddenly ceased to gaze on such sights as youthful poets dream … instead of embellishing original tales of chivalry, of cloathing the fabulous atchievements of the early British kings and champions in the gorgeous trappings of epic attire, he wrote Smectymnuus and Tetrachordon, apologies for fanatical preachers and the doctrine of divorce. … Yet in this chaos of controversy … he sometimes seems to have heaved a sigh for the peaceable enjoyments of lettered solitude, for his congenial pursuits, and the more mild and ingenuous exercises of the muse. In one of his prose tracts, he says, ‘I may one day hope to have ye again in a still time, when there shall be no Chiding. …’ When Milton wrote these poems Romances and fabulous narratives were still in fashion, and not yet driven away by puritans and usurpers. … Milton, at least in these poems, may be reckoned an old English poet; and therefore here requires that illustration, without which no old English poet can be well illustrated.

(Preface, pp. xi-xii and xx-xxi)

These early poems of Milton seem to Warton the last emanation of those flights of fancy which had figuratively and inventively bodied forth the experiences of life itself, to transmute mundane existence into an artificial but poetical ideal. This faculty has departed with the new insistence on the importance of everyday life and manners. He illustrates his point with reference to Elizabethan love poetry. When the Elizabethan lover praises his mistress;

She is complimented in strains neither polite nor pathetic, without elegance, and without affection: she is described, not in the address of intelligible yet artful panegyric, not in the real colours, and with the genuine accomplishments of nature, but as an eccentric ideal being of another system, and as inspiring sentiments equally unmeaning, hyperbolical and unnatural.

(iii, 501)

All or most of these circumstances contributed to give a descriptive, a picturesque, and a figurative cast to the poetical language. This effect appears even in the prose compositions of the reign of Elizabeth I. In the subsequent age, prose became the language of poetry.

Thomas Warton does not localise the problems of the poets of his time merely in terms of a reaction against Pope, but attempts with reference to a rich diversity of literary contexts to ascertain the nature of the experience offered by true poetry. In so far as his particular concern is with English poetry he locates its origins in the highly fictionalised renderings of past modes and bygone ideals of that allegorical and romance tradition which flowered in the natural genius of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton.

Notes

1. The Gothic Revival (Pelican; London, 1962), 21-2, 33, 16.

2. Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground (London, 1964), 79-80.

3. The Percy Letters, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, ed. M. G. Robinson and Leah Dennis (Louisiana State U.P., 1951), 69-70.

4. The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London, 1969), p. xvii.

5. Thomas Warton's Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry, delivered 1757; unpublished MS., translated by Professor W. S. Watt.

6. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, pp. xxii, 123, 130, 133.

7. Mant, i, lviii-lxi.

8. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols (London, 1926), i, x-xi.

9. Mason to Walpole, 1772, in Horace Walpole's Correspondence with William Mason, ed. W. S. Lewis, G. Cronin Jr., and C. H. Bennett (Yale ed. Walpole's Correspondence, vols 28-9; London, 1955), i, 148; ‘Thomas Warton’, D.N.B., ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols (London 1899), lix; cf. Chalmers, ‘Life of Thomas Warton’, in The Works of the English Poets.

10. See H. E. D. Blakiston, ‘Thomas Warton and Machyn's Diary’, E.H.R., xi (1896), 282-300.

11. R. D. Havens, ‘Thomas Warton and the Eighteenth Century Dilemma’, S.P., xxv (1928), 50.