tructive and ethical mannerisms of the later
classicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse,
especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excluded
self-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but
who was in several respects a better critic than either Addison or
himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edged
away from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feels
things aesthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The result
was that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didactic
reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the only
relief, since

"who could take offence
While pure description held the place of sense?"

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton's
most remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or
rather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is
first foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast," and when the history of the
school comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing an
antinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of,
Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less
remarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism
of the classical school. "Avoid extremes," Pope had said, and
moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laid
down as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "The
Enthusiast," was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach.
He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of
some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks

"Thou didst seek
Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream
Or grove of fairy: then thy nightly ear,
As from the wild notes of some airy harp,
Thrilled with strange music."

The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged in
Joseph's own earliest verses:--

"All beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms
Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise,
Where turn the ecstatic eye, _how ease my breast
That pants with wild astonishment and love_?"

The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Nature
methodis'd" of the _Essay on Criticism_. It is not to be distinguished
from the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to b