t a given date by the most enthusiastic and
intelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. But
to do this we must cultivate a little of that catholicity of heart which
perceives technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an earlier
date, and not merely where the current generation finds it.

Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford professor of poetry,
an old Jacobite of no observable merit beyond that of surrounding his
family with an atmosphere of the study of verse. The elder brother was
born in 1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell a
little tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon the use of them.
Without dates the whole point of that precedency of the Wartons, which I
desire to bring out, is lost. The brothers began very early to devote
themselves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years which
divided them, they appear to have meditated in unison. Their writings
bear a close resemblance to one another, and their merits and their
failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we
can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the
woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with
ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of
birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas
were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided,
with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional
reference to definite objects.

Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion, and no doubt the
library of their father, the Professor of Poetry, was at their disposal
from a very early hour. The result of their studies was a remarkable
one, and the discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He was,
so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the modern world of
Europe to observe what vain sacrifices had been made by the classicists,
and in particular by the English classicists, and as he walked
enthusiastically in the forest he formed a determination to reconquer
the realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct became a
purpose, we may say that the great Romantic Movement, such as it has
enlarged and dwindled down to our own day, took its start. The Wartons
were not men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose or
verse, have not taken hold of the national memory. But the advance of a