SOURCE: Rogers, Pat. “Thomas Warton and the Waxing of the Middle Ages.” In Medieval Literature and Antiquities: Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle, edited by Myra Stokes and T. L. Burton, pp. 175-86. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987.

[In the following essay, Rogers contends that Warton's History of English Poetry played a significant role in the codifying of historical eras in literature.]

In any age, Basil Cottle would have been a notable scholar. But it is only within the last century and a half that he could possibly have held a distinguished post in Medieval English. The prime reason for this has nothing to do with the belated appearance of departments of English within universities (Dr Cottle could, in any case, have survived happily under the aegis of ‘classical studies’ (to use an anachronistic form), such are his attainments in the ancient languages). But the middle ages, as a linguistic entity, were not fully to dawn until the nineteenth century. Prior to 1800, anyone who wished to specialize in, say, Middle English (not many did) would have had to describe himself or herself as a Goth of one kind or another.

The lexical history of terms such as ‘middle age’ and ‘medieval’ has been explored on a few occasions, although never for the purposes I shall adopt in this essay. When the original [Oxford English Dictionary; hereafter cited as OED] reached the letter M in about 1905, the editors were unable to find any examples of middle age(s) earlier than 1722, with two further citations from the eighteenth century—the more interesting from Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1753 edition). The illustrations show that the usage took off properly in the next century, and it was probably Henry Hallam's work entitled A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) which confirmed the currency of the phrase as a historiographical marker. The recent supplement to OED has found earlier citations, from a Donne sermon and from the historian Henry Spelman: both date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century, but neither seems to be the easy use of a widely recognizable or accepted label. The locution existed, but it did not trip off the tongue: it had still to acquire the force of a technical term. As for the entry mediæval, medieval, OED finds nothing prior to 1827. The second instance given is dated 1856, and comes from Ruskin; he provides the first example for both mediævalist (1874) and mediævalism (1853). The supplement cannot antedate these cases: so recent is the adoption of expressions which seem so necessary and natural in the scholarly world today.

In a recent essay in Speculum, Fred C. Robinson has considered both these key terms, though in a highly personal manner. His article has two centres of interest: first, the earliest appearance of the terms in major European languages, and second, their current linguistic fate. Robinson ends by deploring the ‘sorry semantic state of medieval and Middle Ages’ today—by this he means such distorted usages as ‘medieval torture’. His complaint is ostensibly on grounds of historical accuracy (medieval warfare was not conducted with the ferocity which careless modern speakers and writers assume). But on a deeper level it can be seen as part of a long campaign to distance these words from associations of barbarity and uncivilized crudity. This ‘anti-medieval mischief’ has been going on in the language for centuries, and it is a pity that Robinson's account leaps over a truly crucial phase in the evolution of both expressions. What he says about the emergence of the terms is highly important; Robinson shows, for example, that there was a separate development of the phrase ‘Middle Age’ (and its equivalents) in modern languages, independently of the supposed root form medium aevum. Alongside this neo-Latin version there were competing expressions such as media aetas. In addition, Robinson has some useful comments on such matters as the preference in various languages for singular or plural in the noun age/s: and he even has time to say something about the Anglo-American split on the medial vowel in mediæval/medieval. It is, in short, a stimulating discussion of an intrinsically important topic.¹

But there is a black hole at the centre of this cosmography. One cannot understand the current semantic state of the keywords under review, whether it be sorry or otherwise, without some understanding of what happened to them in their lexical adolescence. As far as English goes, this is intimately tied up with a complex set of historical, political, cultural and social factors. The story carries a sub-plot, in the form of the fortunes of the Gothic. Our neutral and technical use of medieval in the present century, just as much as our casual or journalistic application of the word as a loosely condemnatory term, goes back to developments in the language two hundred years ago. It was the eighteenth century which institutionalized the study of Old and Middle English, though it did not invent such study. For its own purposes the age increasingly came to feel the need for labels and descriptive terminology: the shorthand of historical analysis. In my submission, it was the intellectual needs which manifested themselves around the 1770s which explain, more than any other comparable data, the course which middle ages and (indirectly) medieval have taken in subsequent use. According to this view of the matter, it was that curious marriage between old and new, the enlightenment and the antiquarian movement, which produced the first literary history and the first ideological typing of the medieval. The key figure in this process is Thomas Warton, though he must be seen in a context which displays to view Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy, Warton's own brother Joseph, and others.

I

Thomas Warton is celebrated as the author of what is generally considered the first major work of literary history in the language: the History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, which appeared in three volumes between 1774 and 1781. Part of a fourth volume was left incomplete at Warton's death in 1790, and was printed in subsequent editions, notably that of Richard Price in 1824. Two dissertations were placed in the first volume, a third, on the Gesta Romanorum, followed in the third. Price puts all three at the head of the entire work.² Warton had corresponded with Gray in 1769-70, at a time when the poet was finally resigning himself to the fact that his own planned history would never go beyond ‘fragments, or sketches of a design’. Through the intercession of Hurd and William Mason, Warton sought to discover what Gray's ‘scheme’ for his work had been. After some delay Gray sent Warton his outline of the history of English poetry, ‘in some measure taken from a scribbled paper of Pope’. The only relevant feature of this draft for our present purposes is that it is divided into ‘schools’, but has no term remotely corresponding to medieval. There is a reference to the poetry ‘of the Goths’, but this is a loose racial categorization, not any sort of cultural marker and not really a period designation as such.³

Warton's plan is different in significant ways. After the dissertations, it is almost entirely a chronological account; the notorious digressive quality of the text does not affect that fact. The narrative is chiefly organized under reigns of the various English monarchs, even where Warton can find nothing specially characteristic in the writing of that reign. A typical opening to a chapter will take the form, ‘We have seen, in the preceding section, that the character of our poetical composition began to be changed about the reign of the first Edward’ (I. 111). Warton is not seeking to create wholly discrete phases of ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Ricardian’ poetry and the like, but his method does directly involve a mode of periodization which is central to the development of literary history. Such temporal organization is so natural to us that it takes an effort to appreciate how avoidable such a course was for Warton. In the vogue work of criticism from the previous decade, Warton's friend Richard Hurd had set out his ideas in a series of Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). Similarly, Edward Young had offered Conjectures on Original Composition, ‘in a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison’ (1759). Such forms of words indicate that the discursive will prevail over the temporal. Literature will be viewed sub specie aeternitatis, or at least under aspects which only incidentally correspond with time divisions. Warton made a celebrated claim to the effect that he was undertaking something unattempted yet, a history ‘at large, and in form’. The claim is justified in more than a purely formal sense. Few books, as a matter of fact, had actually specified their subject matter by reference to ‘centuries’: the word, as applied to a period such as 1500-1600, did not enter English until the 1630s and was quite rare until Warton's time (Adam Smith employs it in The Wealth of Nations). And no treatment of literature had been on a wide enough scale to make an overarching concept such as the middle ages fully intelligible between a single pair of covers. This concept was later adopted in the service of various Whig versions of literary history; Warton helped to initiate the Whig versions, not because of the specific teleology which his argument enshrines (although there is one), but because he laid foundations large enough for others to construct their own intellectual edifices on.

There are two seminal modern accounts of the nature of Warton's achievement. One is the culminating chapter in René Wellek's magisterial Rise of English Literary History (1941; 2nd edn, 1966). The other is the section devoted to the History in Lawrence Lipking's The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970): this brilliant panoptic volume sets Warton alongside the historical surveys and summations of men like Johnson, Horace Walpole, Reynolds, John Hawkins and Charles Burney. Both are remarkably illuminating, and deserve careful study.⁴ But Lipking seems to me to exaggerate the ‘thoroughly compromised’ form of the History. He speaks of a ‘surrender’ by Warton to the materials, the blurring of ‘any clear line of interpretation’, the inability to contrive any ‘permanent order for English poetry’. According to Lipking, Warton was defeated by his vacillation on the issue of progress:

Earlier historians of poetry like Pope and Spence and even Gray could believe in a progress of poetry that had led to their own times; later historians could believe that all great poets join in a single community of genius which acknowledges no progress or division. Warton could believe both, or neither. At times he applies the idea of progress dogmatically, at times he dogmatically contradicts it.

As a result, Warton has no true principle guiding his work: ‘Politely turning his back on schools and systems, [he] opens his history to the full complicated play of illimitable information.’ But Lipking's last observation is based on what Warton says in his preface, and the subsequent text does not altogether bear out that statement of intent.

Though not systematic, Warton's historicism is endemic to his book. It is seen as clearly as anywhere at the start of the dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum:

Tales are the learning of a rude age. In the progress of letters, speculation and enquiry commence with refinement of manners. Literature becomes sentimental and discursive, in proportion as a people is polished: and men must be instructed by facts, either real or imaginary, before they can apprehend the subtleties of argument, and the force of reflection.

(I.clxxvii)

What is apparent here, and it is a crucial quality which Lipking and others have missed, is a strong tincture of enlightenment thought and jargon (especially seen in words such as ‘refinement of manners’, ‘sentimental’, ‘polished’). Warton is indeed writing the progress of romance, a decade before Clara Reeve undertook that task. Later on, we find Warton remarking of minstrelsy, ‘as the minstrel profession became a science, and the audience grew more civilised, refinements began to be studied, and the romantic poet sought to gain new attention, and to recommend his story, by giving it the advantage of a plan’ (II. 14-15). Later still, the narrative reaches Stephen Hawes, and Warton controverts the opinion of Antony Wood regarding the Passetyme of Pleasure:

Wood, with the zeal of a true antiquary, laments, that ‘such is the fate of poetry, that this book, which in the time of Henry the Seventh and Eighth was taken into the hands of all ingenious men, is now thought but worthy of a ballad-monger's stall!’ The truth is, such is the good fortune of poetry, and such the improvement of taste, that much better books are become fashionable.

(III. 54)

The received view of Warton would place him as one actuated by ‘the zeal of a true antiquary’. What such passages show is that he could take a more independent line. The entire work is studded with comments along these lines:

The antiquaries of former times overlooked or rejected these valuable remains [‘fables of chivalry’]. … But in the present age we are beginning to make ample amends: in which the curiosity of the antiquarian is connected with taste and genius, and his researches tend to display the progress of human manners, and to illustrate the history of society.

(II. 41-2)

The key word here, along with ‘progress’, is obviously ‘taste’. A sentence like the last one quoted could hardly have been written without the tutelary presence of Hume. And indeed the Scottish enlightenment underlines the entire work—not surprising for any book entitled a ‘history’ in the 1770s, but a totally disregarded fact up till now. A long shadow is cast over the work by a classic text of the previous decade: Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), with its seminal discussion of the nature of a ‘polished’ society. Ferguson considers the use of such expressions as ‘barbarian’ in the light of conquest and colonization; he anatomizes the idea of progress in terms of organic metaphor; and he plots the stages by which civilizations move from the ‘rude’ to the ‘refined’. I do not know whether Warton read this actual work, but its currency was sufficient for its message to spread through to him by osmosis. Warton can hardly have missed the ideas of Hume, or those of Adam Smith—even though what appears to have been Smith's classic statement of the four stages of human development remained in the form of unpublished lecture notes until recently, and did its work through the advocacy of Smith's pupils and acolytes.⁵

This is, needless to say, not an attempt to recruit Warton to the ranks of the Edinburgh literati. But no one writing at this precise juncture, on issues of historical evolution, could fail to be influenced at some level by the ferment of thought in this area. Even a timid Oxford don would have gleaned from his literary contacts something of what had been happening in ideas. Warton was not so blinkered as to have avoided reading and citing, several times, the historical work of Voltaire. Meetings with Burke at the Club, not to mention the appearance of The Wealth of Nations and the first part of the Decline and Fall in 1776, would further have opened his mind. The source of such contamination of an old-style antiquarian sensibility by fashionable philosophic history can only be a matter of conjecture, in the absence of published records of Warton's reading at the time he was engaged on writing the History. But the fact of this influence is visible throughout: an example occurs in the discussion of the effect of the ‘cultivation of an English style’ during the Renaissance—another omnipresent modern term not available to Warton, who speaks of ‘the general restoration of knowledge and taste’ (IV. 154). Few later generations would specify ‘taste’ in delimiting this epoch. Warton's idiom at such moments is often close to that in which Johnson contemplates raw nature in the Hebrides and places it in the scale of values against ‘civilization’. The idea of literacy is central to both authors. But the point of making such collocations is not to give Warton a precise intellectual ancestry; it is rather to indicate that Warton's novel enterprise had its parallels among the social and political enquiries of the time. Ragged as its final effect may sometimes be, Warton's book is far more than a thoughtless accumulation of detail (a fault he imputes to the early chroniclers). It is in fact an attempt to range facts, to make sense of a series of events by imputing connection, contrast, development. Warton is constantly explaining features of literature by reference to its historically determined quality: thus, ‘It is in vain to apologise for the coarseness, obscenity, and scurrility of Skelton, by saying that his poetry is tinctured with the manners of his age. Skelton would have been a writer without decorum at any period’ (III. 167).

Warton seeks ‘a general literary history of Britain’ (III. 161), and to this end follows ‘the progress of modern letters in the fifteenth century’ (III. 257). His habit of periodization results at times in what may now seem a blatant kind of historicism: ‘I consider Chaucer, as a genial day in an English spring. … But winter returns with redoubled horrors … and those tender buds … which were called forth by the transient gleam of a temporary sun-shine, are nipped by frosts’ (II. 361). In other words, ‘most of the poets that immediately succeeded Chaucer seem … relapsing into barbarism’. The point is not how persuasive such views are, but how intelligible they make history. I wish to suggest that Warton, more than anyone else, gave a shape and entelechy to the course of literature. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81) could not do this, since they began in the seventeenth century. Gray had characteristically ducked out. Percy could editorialize, Mason could biographicize, Hurd and Joseph Warton could criticize—but none of these was able to realign the great historical categories. It took a maggoty old fellow to construct a usable past. Like another seemingly credulous guardian of a cabinet of curiosities, John Aubrey, he was to show that what looked like antiquarian jottings could lay the groundwork of a serious and organized human science.

II

‘The progress of romance and the state of learning in the middle ages’, wrote Gibbon in the Decline and Fall, ‘are illustrated by Mr Thomas Warton with the taste of a poet, and the minute diligence of an antiquarian.’⁶ This is one of Gibbon's very infrequent uses of the term at the centre of this inquiry. It was by no means a familiar or natural expression, even at the height of a decade which saw unparalleled activity in historiography. For example, it scarcely ever occurs in Charles Burney's General History of Music: I have noted a fitful instance, in the second volume (1782): ‘With respect to the music of the middle ages in Italy. …’ Burney, of course, has the standard concerns of the age; his attitudes are made manifest in a passage earlier in this same volume:

If it be true that the progress of music in every country depends on the degrees of civilization and culture of other arts and sciences among its inhabitants, and on the languages which they speak … great perfection cannot be expected in the music of Europe during the middle ages, when the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Germans, Franks, and Gauls, whose ideas were savage, and language harsh and insolent, had seized on its most fertile provinces.

The role of Italy was to ‘civilize and polish [its] conquerors’; whereas it is inconceivable that the Welsh, ‘a rude, and uncivilized people, … without commerce or communication with the rest of Europe, should invent counterpoint’. Burney also refers to a ‘dark and Gothic period’.⁷

A rapid scan suggests that Joshua Reynolds's Discourses contrive, not surprisingly, to get by without any mention of the middle ages. But the term is also rare, more unexpectedly, in William Robertson's History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769). This work enjoyed great celebrity in its day, and was at the peak of its renown when Thomas Warton was engaged on his magnum opus. Robertson begins with ‘A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century’ (note the parallel in form to Warton's title). He makes reference to ‘the martial spirit of Europe, during the middle ages’, and to ‘the first literary efforts … of the European nations in the middle ages’. But his concern is avowedly philosophical, that is, analytic rather than chronological; it is a review of such matters as feudalism, rather than a century-by-century chronicle of the dark ages.⁸ This is very different from Warton, who organizes his work on narrative rather than discursive lines. The discursive episodes are, formally speaking, inadvertent.

A comparison might also be drawn with Percy's Reliques. The very first sentence of the ‘Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in England’, which Thomas Percy set at the head of his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), states that ‘The Minstrels were an order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music’. But the concept of the middle ages drops from attention as Percy goes on to compile a ‘slight history’ of minstrelsy from the ‘scanty materials’ available. In his Preface, Percy evinces the usual desire to ‘exhibit the progress of popular opinions’, and seeks to display the ‘many artless graces’ of primitive poetry for the delight of ‘a polished age, like the present’.⁹ Five years later, Percy wrote a preface to the translation of Paul-Henri Mallet's Introduction à l'histoire du Danemarck, entitled Northern Antiquities. This is mainly devoted to dispelling the confusion which had arisen concerning the notions ‘Gothic’ and ‘Celtic’, and although it reveals the usual preoccupations (‘refinement of manners’ as a source of linguistic change, for example), it does not reach the medieval era proper.¹⁰

None of these writers, whatever his contribution, seems to me to have foregrounded the ‘medieval’ as Warton does, though he cannot yet do this eo nomine. His employment of the expression ‘middle ages’, though more regular than that of his colleagues, is equally casual and unemphatic on most occasions. Thus we are told that ‘Statius was a favourite writer with the poets of the middle ages’ (II. 197). Confessio Amantis is a miscellany of the tales which delighted ‘readers of the middle age’ (Warton makes no distinction between singular and plural forms). Just over the page, there is mention of collections of the marvellous ‘which in the middle ages multiplied to an excessive degree’ (II. 313, 315). But on at least one occasion the defining role of the term is crucial, for it is precisely on its ‘historical’ function that this characteristic passage of the History relies:

We are apt to form romantic and exaggerated notions about the moral innocence of our ancestors. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. The direct contrary, I believe, is the case. Rude periods have that grossness of manners which is not less friendly to virtue than luxury itself. In the middle ages, not only the most flagrant violations of modesty were frequently practised and permitted, but the most infamous vices. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished.

All this derives from the belief that ‘Chaucer's obscenity’, in the fabliaux naturally, ‘is in great measure to be imputed to his age’ (II. 266-7). We need not enter here into the question of how much—if any—historical understanding Warton actually commands when writing in this vein. The point is that he seeks to make sense of the past specifically by allowing for the situation of earlier writers. The evolution of a definable ‘middle age’ was essential to his purposes. Sometimes he can make do with a more narrowly delimited temporal span: ‘Many classic authors were known in the thirteenth century, but the scholars of that period wanted taste to read and admire them’ (II. 175).

But the sweep of the History is such that Warton often feels the need for broader categories. It is the ‘age’ at large, not a temporary fashion, which explains the lack of any ‘just idea of decorum’ in the miracle plays (II. 76). Even in his moments of near-Gibbonian irony, Warton is especially prone to the word ‘age’ to adumbrate historical change. On the subject of Stonehenge, he remarks, ‘That the Druids constructed this stupendous pile for a place of worship, was a discovery reserved for the sagacity of a wiser age, and the laborious discussion of modern antiquaries’ (II. 466). Irony is perhaps not the right word here: Warton does not doubt for a minute that his is a wiser age, and his faint self-mocking amusement rests on a clearcut view of the ‘progress’ from one age to another. No previous generation of writers had such constant occasion for the terminology of ages, eras, epochs. A self-consciously ‘refined’ culture needs to naturalize its prejudices, and the ideological function of ‘middle ages’ is to give essentially normative terms the force of neutral historic markers. Warton's book is the most important single document in the literary sphere to perform this task.

III

The question may well be asked, were there no preceding terms which the new expressions came to supplant? The answer is yes and no. None of the possible synonyms or alternative concepts could fill exactly the same role as ‘middle ages’. Expressions like ‘our feudal ancestry’ or ‘the spirit of chivalry’, used by Warton's editor Price, are too specialized for general use.¹¹ The fact is that the commonest epithets in the eighteenth century are simply ‘ancient’ writers, ‘older’ literature, and the like. Warton himself has ‘our elder English classics’ (II. 41). But words like ‘older’ have a double ambiguity. First of all, they can lead to confusion with a quite different group of ancient writers, that is, those of classical antiquity. Second, the usage works in opposition to the common verbal habit which alludes to the ‘infancy of society’, a key notion in the enlightenment critique (as in Smith and Ferguson), explicitly or implicitly. People of Warton's generation saw their own culture as mature and developed; they did not really want expressions which suggested that their predecessors were older than themselves. There is a bit of an ambiguity with ‘middle age’, but it was a less worrying one for Warton and his friends.

This is to leave aside the other key term, ‘Gothic’, which is a topic too large to enter upon in any detail. It is enough to say that Warton uses the expression a dozen or more times in his History, but generally in a ‘neutral’ fashion. The word is employed sometimes in an architectural or artistic sense (e.g. III. 394, 462). Sometimes it is quasi-ethnological, used in the sense Percy attempted to make distinctive. But sometimes it does appear to be a kind of historical label, as when Warton says, ‘The very devotion of the Gothic times was romantic’ (III. 285). The commonest usage is ‘Gothic romance’ or ‘Gothic fiction’, an indeterminate form.

Plainly, the overtones of the word were so complex, and for the most part so obviously hostile, that it could not seriously hope to survive as a bland historical term. One student has distinguished three principal senses of ‘Gothic’ in the period.¹² The first is the opprobrious expression meaning barbarous or uncivilized. The second, in time, is the plain sense ‘medieval’ (neither is in the first edition of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755, though the former appears in the 1773 revision). A third and more specialized sense is the one found in ‘Gothic novel’, that is, ‘grotesque’ or ‘supernatural’. The student argues that the first two senses ‘marched on’ their separate ways, without any mutual influence. He suggests that it was Hurd who neutralized the term for general historical use, in his famous Letters on Chivalry and Romance. But the term is as much an aesthetic categorizer as a simple temporal marker; when Hurd distinguishes a Gothic poem from a classical one, he is not really pointing to any closely defined epoch. Hurd speaks without any embarrassment of the ‘Gothic language and ideas’ in Paradise Regained, and this is more like the third sense than the second. It was only with the History of Warton, in my judgment, that the expression loses all its emotional overtones. Famously, in his poem on Reynolds's window at New College, Oxford (1782), Thomas Warton frees himself of ‘visionary rapture’ and with the help of Reynolds's classic art breaks the ‘Gothic chain’. In fact, most commentators believe that his fundamental adherences remained unaffected up to his death.¹³ But it could be said that in the History he had done much to break the Gothic chain, in the sense of supplying an alternative model of cultural development, which meant there was less need for an overtly normative term such as ‘Gothic’ had always been, in Hurd as much as anywhere else. (That Hurd approves where others had disapproved does not affect the point.)

Warton was never to complete the task he set himself. In 1790, as Isaac D'Israeli rather heartlessly put it, he expired amid his volumes.¹⁴ But he had done much already to codify, as well as to chronicle, English poetry. There are two passages of surpassing eloquence which stuck in the English mind for generations: all the major Romantic poets knew these paragraphs. One concerns the reign of Elizabeth, in Section LXI: here Warton asserts that the reformation did not manage to ‘disenchant all the strong holds of superstition’:

A few dim characters were yet legible in the mouldering creed of tradition. Every goblin of ignorance did not vanish at the first glimmerings of the morning of science. Reason suffered a few demons still to linger, which she chose to retain in her service under the guidance of poetry.

(IV. 327)

And there is a still more plangent threnody for the poetic world which had been lost in the account of Henry VIII's reign (III. 284-5), where Warton describes the pageants and ceremonies of earlier times as ‘friendly to imagery … and allegory’. His basic idea is that ‘the customs, institutions, traditions, and religion, of the middle ages, were favorable to poetry’. What may strike us most today is not the truth or otherwise of the picture he draws, but the sheer fact of a period designated as ‘middle ages’ for Warton to dilate upon. The jargon of our schools owes an unsuspected debt to Thomas Warton.

Notes

1. Fred C. Robinson, ‘Medieval, the Middle Ages’, Speculum 59 (1984) 745-56.

2. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. [Richard Price], 4 vols (London, 1824). All references are to this edition. Subsequent quotations are given in the text within parentheses.

3. Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. P. Toynbee and L. Whibley, rev. H. W. Starr (Oxford, 1971), III. 1092-3, 1125-7.

4. R. Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (1941; rptd. New York, 1966), pp. 166-201; L. Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970), pp. 352-404 (quotations which follow are from pp. 354-5, 371, 395-6). A more specialized but informative treatment will be found in Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London, 1973), pp. 167-214.

5. Smith's lecture notes are printed in The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment 1707-1776, ed. Jane Rendall (London, 1978), pp. 141-3. Quotations from Ferguson relevant to my argument appear on pp. 137-9, 187-9, 201-3; for Hume, Robertson, John Millar et al. see Rendall, passim.

6. Cited by Price, History of Poetry, I. iⁿ.

7. C. Burney, A General History of Music, ed. F. Mercer (London, 1935), 2 vols: I. 457, 458, 487, 622, 631.

8. W. Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 7th edn (London, 1792), I. 61, 87.

9. T. Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1857), I. xvi, xxv, xxxv.

10. P.-H. Mallet, Northern Antiquities, tr. T. Percy [et al.], ed. I. A. Blackwell (London, 1847), pp. 1-21.

11. Price, ed., History of Poetry, I. 12-13.

12. Alfred E. Longueil, ‘The Word “Gothic” in Eighteenth Century Criticism’, MLN 38 (1923) 453-60.

13. See the discusion in Lipking, pp. 396-401.

14. Cited by James Ogden, Isaac D'Israeli (Oxford, 1969), p. 174.