nce and
affection could ensure him, but not unembittered by those disastrous
accidents to which every father of a family is exposed. Some years after
his marriage (1763) his letters to his brother discover him struggling
under his anguish for the loss of a favourite daughter, who had died
under inoculation, but striving to conceal his feelings for the sake of
a wife whom he tenderly loved. In 1772, this wife was also taken from
him, leaving him with six children. His second son, Thomas, fellow of
New College, a man on whom the poetic spirit of the Wartons had
descended, was found by him, one day when he returned from the college
prayers, sitting in the chair in which he had left him after dinner,
without life. It was the termination of a disease under which he had
long laboured. This happened in 1786; and before he had space to recover
the blow, in four years after, his brother died. In 1773, he had solaced
himself by a second marriage with Miss Nicholas, the daughter of Robert
Nicholas, Esq. In both his matrimonial connexions, his sister described
him as having been eminently fortunate.

The latter part of his life was spent in retirement and tranquillity. In
1793, he resigned the mastership of Winchester, and settled himself on
his living of Wickham. He had intended to finish his brother's History
of English Poetry, which wanted another volume to complete it; and might
now have found time enough to accomplish the task. But an obstacle
presented itself, by which it is likely that he was discouraged from
proceeding. The description given by Daniel Prince, a respectable old
bookseller at Oxford, of the state in which his brother's rooms were
found at his decease, and of the fate that befell his manuscripts and
his property, may be edifying to some future fellow of a college, who
shall employ himself in similar pursuits.[3] "Poor Thomas Warton's
papers were in a sad litter, and his brother Joe has made matters worse
by confusedly cramming all together, sending them to Winchester, &c. Mr.
Warton could not give so much as his old clothes; his very shoes,
stockings, and wigs, laid about in abundance. Where could his money go?
It must lay in paper among his papers, or be laid in a book; he could
not, nor did not spend it; and his brother, on that score, is greatly
disappointed."

A republication of Pope's works, with notes, offered him an easier
occupation than the digesting of those scattered materials for the
History of P