used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, where he was a member
of Johnson's literary club. Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and
indolent in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to a turkey
cock, was careless in his personal habits and averse to polite society.
He was the life of a common room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys
when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was said to have a
hankering after pipes and ale and the broad mirth of the taproom. Both
Wartons had an odd passion for military parades; and Thomas--who was a
believer in ghosts--used secretly to attend hangings. They were also
remarkably harmonious in their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager
students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British
antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant
scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets. But their work
was quite unoriginal. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and
assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson,
Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's
dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his
technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist. Like
Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic
past:

"Tales that have the rime of age,
And chronicles of eld."

The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet "Written in a Blank Leaf of
Dugdale's Monasticon"[8]--a favorite with Charles Lamb--might have been
written by Longfellow:

"Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers."

Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger
brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his _facetiae_ in the
"Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor.
These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too,
with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc.
Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to
his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers'
piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New
Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to
early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp"
sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and