et me
suggest that we make a great mistake in treating the works of old
writers as if they had been always written by old men. I am trying to
present the Wartons to you as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic
youths, flushed with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how
poetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by inspiration, not by
rote. Remember that when they took their walks in the forest at
Hackwood, the whole world of culture held that true genius had expired
with Pope, and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton and
such-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you that Pope was
divided from them not more than Swinburne is divided from us. Conceive
two very young men to-day putting their heads together to devise a
scheme of poetry which should entirely supersede that, not of Swinburne
only, but of Tennyson and Browning also, and you have the original
attitude of the Wartons.

It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of the spell which
Pope threw over the literary conscience of the eighteenth century. Forty
years after the revolt of the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by the
average critic as "the most distinguished and the most interesting Poet
of the nation." Joseph Warton was styled "the Winton Pedant" for
suggesting that Pope paid too dearly for his lucidity and lightness, and
for desiring to break up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mould
which gave a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. His
_Essay on Pope_, though written with such studied moderation that we
may, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shocking
to the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universal
disfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moral
courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who,
alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholy
solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was to
be one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and who
dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nerves
of all genuine poetry."

Warton's _Essay on the Genius of Pope_ is not well arranged, and, in
spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much
attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which
is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was
advanced. In the author's own words it was t