ne amongst a crowd at a public
execution. He retained to old age the amiable simplicity and
unsuspecting frankness of boyhood: his affection for his brother, to
whose society at Winchester he latterly retired from college, during the
vacations in summer, does not seem ever to have suffered any abatement;
and his manners were tranquil and unassuming. The same amenity and
candour of disposition, which marked him in private life, pervade his
writings, except on some few occasions, when his mind is too much under
the influence of party feelings. This bias inclined him, not only to
treat the character of Milton with a most undue asperity, but even to
extenuate the atrocities committed under the government of Mary, and
somewhat to depreciate the worth of those divines, whose attachment to
the reformed religion led them to suffer death in her reign.

The writer of this paper has been told by an Italian, who was acquainted
with Warton, that his favourite book in the Italian language (of which
his knowledge was far from exact) was the Gerusalemme Liberata. Both the
stately phrase, and the theme of that poem, were well suited to him.

Among the poets of the second class, he deserves a distinguished place.
He is almost equally pleasing in his gayer, and in his more exalted
moods. His mirth is without malice or indecency, and his seriousness
without gloom.

In his lyrical pieces, if we seek in vain for the variety and music of
Dryden, the tender and moral sublime of Gray, or the enthusiasm of
Collins, yet we recognize an attention ever awake to the appearances of
nature, and a mind stored with the images of classical and Gothic
antiquity. Though his diction is rugged, it is like the cup in Pindar,
which Telamon stretches out to Alcides, [Greek: chruso pephrkuan], rough
with gold, and embost with curious imagery. A lover of the ancients
would, perhaps, be offended, if the birth-day ode, beginning

Within what fountain's craggy cell
Delights the goddess Health to dwell?

were compared, as to its subject, with that of the Theban bard, on the
illness of Hiero, which opens with a wish that Chiron were yet living,
in order that the poet might consult him on the case of the Syracusan
monarch; and in its form, with that in which he asks of his native city,
in whom of all her heroes she most delighted.

Among the odes, some of which might more properly be termed idylliums,
The Hamlet is of uncommon beauty; the landscape is truly E