, I believe
it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the
production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner,
it would find its admirers; but, considered independently, as an
original, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial
composition. There are few who do not read Dr. Percy's own pieces, and
those of other late writers, with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in
the collection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Percy quotes another paper
of Knox in which he divides the admirers of English poetry into two
parties: "On one side are the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton;
and on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope"; in modern phrase,
the romanticists and the classicists.

Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope" was an attempt to fix its subject's rank
among English poets. Following the discursive method of Thomas Warton's
"Observations on the Faerie Queen," it was likewise an elaborate
commentary on all of Pope's poems _seriatim_. Every point was
illustrated with abundant learning, and there were digressions amounting
to independent essays on collateral topics: one, _e.g._, on Chaucer, one
on early French Metrical romances; another on Gothic architecture:
another on the new school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's
essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and mention is made of
the Leasowes. The book was dedicated to Young; and when the second
volume was published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised form
and introduced by a letter to the author from Tyrwhitt, who writes that,
under the shelter of Warton's authority, "one may perhaps venture to avow
an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming couplets, and that its
greatest powers are not displayed in prologues and epilogues."

The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's estimate of Pope quite
high enough. He places him, to be sure, in the second rank of poets,
below Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above
Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the great age of English
poetry. Yet if it be recollected that the essay was published only
twelve years after Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly
held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest artist in
verse, that England had ever produced, it will be seen that Warton's
opinions might well be thought revolutionary, and his challenge to the
critics a bold one. These