lly possessed, he withheld and stifled. The
perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel
from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master
of himself while he reads them. . . He who would think the 'Faerie
Queene,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' the 'Tempest' or 'Comus,' childish and
romantic might relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly
encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical
authors in verse."

To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion,
Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and
Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside,
Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He
complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and
his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are
frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with
precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny
mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite
ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no
critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'"

A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary
principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus
he pleads for the _mot precis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century
romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circumstances" against "those who
are fond of _generalities_"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and
Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in
Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained,
in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old
poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet,

"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine!"

he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and
extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much,
and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in
Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton
attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that
forms himself on French writers and their followers."