Edward Warton

“ Fortunate thus in time, Warton was equally fortunate in politics. He was an Oxford Tory, a firm believer in divine right and passive obedience, and a warm supporter of the new ministers. To the King, it may be added, no nomination could have given greater satisfaction. The official odes of Warton evince all the elegant traits which characterize his other writings. Their refined taste and exquisite modulation are admirable; while the matter is far less sycophantic than was to be expected from so devout a monarchist. ”

“ In a poem written in 1745 he shows the delight in Gothic churches and ruined castles which inspired so much of his subsequent work in romantic revival. Most of Warton's poetry, humorous and serious—and the humorous mock heroic was better within his powers than serious verse—was written before the age of twenty-three, when he took his M.A. degree and became a fellow of his college (Trinity, Oxford) . He did not altogether abandon verse; his sonnets, especially, which are the best of his poems, were written later. But his main energies were given to omnivorous poetical reading and criticism. ”

“ Page 1. “Indeed if he well weighed that Epitaph of King Edward the fourth, made by Skelton, which I find inserted amongst the vnprinted Workes of Lydgate, he would be more modest in this kinde.” Qvaternio, 1633, p. 239, by Nash, who cites a considerable portion of this poem from a MS.—Lydgate could not have been alive at the period of Edward’s decease: see Warton’s Hist. of E.P. ii. 51. ed. 4to. (note) , Ritson’s Bibl. ”

“ We feel quite satisfied therefore that Warton hit quite correctly upon the year 1514 as that in which these poems first saw the light, though the ground (the allusion to the Henries) upon which he went was insufficient, and his identification of the hero of the elegy contradicted his supposition. Had he been aware of the importance of fixing the date correctly, he would probably have taken more care than to fall into the blunder of confounding the father with the son, and adorning the former with the dearly earned laurels of the latter. ”

“ Even the mediæval expert of the present day, who finds that much of Warton's information is superannuated and that many of his generalisations have been disproved by later discoveries, realises that nowhere else has he at his command so well furnished an armoury of facts and dates about obscure writers; while for the student of sixteenth-century literature, Warton's results have been at many points developed, but have not as a whole been superseded. His style is unaffected and invariably clear. He never forgot that he was the historian and not the critic of the literature of which he treated. ”

“ But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. ”

“ In person, Warton was at one time short, slim, and handsome; but, as he advanced in years, attained that rotundity of figure, which was the prevailing type of a resident fellow in the past century, and of which a few scattered specimens remain to shame the more wearied workers of a different age. Though silent and shy in company, he was all mirth and hilarity among his associates an inveterate punster, when such word-bandying gave the reputation of wit; the life of the common room ”

“ The last of Warton's odes was written in his last illness, and performed three days after his death. Appositely enough, it was an invocation to Health, meriting more than ordinary praise for eloquent fervor. Warton died May 21st, 1790. The laurel was vacant for a month, when Henry James Pye was gazetted. There was hardly a hungry placeman in London who had not as just pretensions to the honor. What poetical gifts he had displayed had been in school or college exercises. His real claims consisted in having spent a fortune in electioneering for ministers ”

“ In the old days, before commissions and reform, when the Universities were more frequently regarded as a permanent retreat for men who could find a pipe a sufficient substitute for a wife, such jolly fellows112 as Warton formed a larger part of the college society. Most of them, however, were duller dogs than Tom Warton, who, with all his enjoyment of such heavy festivities, managed to write some laborious books. A proud, fastidious, and exquisitely sensitive man like Gray looked upon the whole scene with infinite contempt and scorn. ”

“ Warton's education was directed by his father until he was sixteen, when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, matriculating in the university on 16 March 1743–4. He graduated B.A. in 1747, and, after taking holy orders, engaged in tutorial work in the college. He graduated M.A. in 1750, succeeded to a fellowship next year, and in 1767 proceeded to the degree of B.D. Throughout his life Warton remained a college don, and, although he read and wrote extensively until his death, he never claimed to be a professional man of letters. ”

“ I'm very sure they pity you,
Ye silliest of silly dogs."
The next laureate, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, is too well known and appreciated to require any lengthened notice here. In 1747 and 1748 he held the appointment of laureated poet, to which he was inaugurated, according to the ancient custom, in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to celebrate a lady chosen as lady patroness, and Warton performed his task crowned with a wreath of laurel. In 1757, he was elected professor of poetry, as his father had formerly been in the same university. ”

“ Other livings dropped in upon him, and in 1793 he resigned the mastership of Winchester, and went to reside at Wickham. Here he employed himself in preparing an edition of Pope, which he published in 1797. In 1800 he died.
Warton, like his brother, did good service in resisting the literary despotism of Pope, and in directing the attention of the public to the forgotten treasures of old English poetry. He was a man of extensive learning, a very fair and candid, as well as acute critic, and his 'Ode to Fancy' proves him to have possessed no ordinary genius. ”

“ Fairmile—next Tuesday to dinner, to meet Roger Barnes and his wife? I groan at the thought, for I think she is quite one of the most disagreeable little creatures I ever saw. But Warton says I must—a Lord-Lieutenant can't pick and choose!—and people as rich as they are have to be considered. I can't imagine why it is she makes herself so odious. All the Americans I ever knew I have liked particularly. It is, of course, annoying that they have so much money—but Warton says it isn't their fault—it's Protection, or something of the kind. ”

“ His elder and only brother, Joseph, head master of Winchester School, with whom he had generally spent the long vacation, hastened to Oxford, but arrived too late to witness the closing scene. He was buried on the 27th, with the highest academical pomp, the Vice-Chancellor, the Heads of Houses, and the Proctors, at their own request, attending his funeral.
The influence of Warton upon English literature has been great; greater than at the first glance we should imagine ”

“ The furious beast came open-mouthed upon the youth, who, however, very courageously, and with a happy presence of mind, rammed in the volume, and crying Græcum est, fairly choked the savage.
In an audit-book of Trinity College for the year 1559, Warton found a disbursement “pro prandio Principis natalicii.” ”

“ When all criticism has been allowed for the inaccuracies of Warton's work, and the unsatisfactory nature of his general plan, the fact remains that his book is still indispensable to the student of English poetry. Moreover, much that may seem commonplace in his criticism was entirely fresh and even revolutionary in his own day. Warton directed the attention of readers to early English literature, and, in view of the want of texts, rendered inestimable service by transcribing large extracts from early writers. ”

“ Warton, the refined poet and critic, and his brother Thomas Warton, Poet Laureate, were both educated here, under their father, Thomas Warton, B.D., Professor of Poetry in the university of Oxford, a writer of considerable ability. John De Basinge, a learned Greek scholar, a friend and contemporary of that intelligent historian, Matthew Paris, was a native of this town. He was a man eminent for piety and learning, and a perfect master of the Greek and Latin languages—an eloquent orator—an able mathematician, and a sound divine. ”

“ In 1773 Warton was elected a member of the Literary Club. In 1776 he signed the round-robin asking Johnson to rewrite in English his Latin epitaph on Goldsmith (Boswell, iii. 83) . Johnson, on seeing Warton's signature, declared his wonder that 'Joe Warton, a scholar by profession, should be such a fool' (ib. p. 84 n.) But by humbler men of letters Warton's opinion was highly valued. Cowper was overwhelmed by his approbation. 'The poet,' he wrote, 'who pleases a man like that has nothing left to wish for.'
Some clerical preferment was conferred on Warton while he was still at Winchester. ”

“ He remained in Italy until 1710, and then returned to England by Geneva and Paris.
Warton speaks of St. Amand as ‘literarum Græcarum flagrans studio,’ and the object of his travel was to collate the manuscripts for a new edition of Theocritus which he meditated. His collections ‘magno studio et sumptu facta et comparata a viro Græce doctissimo’ were much used by Warton in his edition of Theocritus (1770) . His house was in East Street, near Red Lion Square, in the parish of St. George the Martyr, Bloomsbury, and he collected there a considerable library of books and manuscripts. ”

“ After an interval of twenty-eight years, his rival, Mason, was probably sincere in the opinion he gave,—that Warton had much excelled him both "in poetical imagery, and in the correct flow of his versification."
He now became a contributor to a monthly miscellany called The Student; in which, besides his Progress of Discontent, were inserted A Panegyric on Oxford Ale, a professed imitation of the Splendid Shilling; The Author confined to College; and A Version of the twenty-ninth chapter of Job. ”

“ 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 opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as best suits the purpose.
"The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy. ”

“ JOSEPH WARTON. The Memoirs of Joseph Warton, by Dr. Wooll, the present Head-master of Rugby school, is a book which, although it contains a faithful representation of his life and character by one who had been his pupil, and though it is enriched with a collection of letters between some of the men most distinguished in literature during his time, is yet so much less known than it deserves, that in speaking of it to Mr. Hayley, who had been intimate with Warton, and to whom some of the letters are addressed, I found him ignorant of its contents. ”

“ North added that ‘Tom Warton was the finest fellow that ever breathed.’ In person he was, in middle life, unattractive, being, according to the most truthful observers, a fat little man, with a thick utterance resembling the gobble of a turkey-cock. With his love of scholarly study he combined somewhat slovenly habits and a taste for unrefined amusements. He delighted in the society of the Oxford watermen, and shocked the susceptibilities of his fellow-dons by often appearing in the Watermen's company on the river with a pipe in his mouth. ”

“ He clearly possessed the confidence of both the sisters, and was sent by Mary on 26 April 1558 to broach to Elizabeth an offer of marriage from Eric of Sweden (Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xvi. f. 334, in Burnet, l.c. No. 37; Warton, pp. 99–103) . The commonly accepted accounts of the festivities given in honour of Elizabeth, mainly ‘at the chardges of Sir Thomas Pope,’ during 1557 and 1558, rest on no trustworthy evidence. Warton says that he derived them from copies made for him by Francis Wise of Strype's alleged transcripts of the then unpublished ‘Machyn's Diary’ in the Cottonian Library. ”

“ Mant, now Bishop of Killaloe, prefixed to the edition of his poems published at Oxford, is drawn from sources so authentic, and detailed with so much exactness, that little remains to be added to the circumstances which it relates.
Thomas Warton was descended from a very respectable family in Yorkshire. His grandfather, Anthony Warton, was rector of a village in Hampshire; and his father was a fellow of Magdalen College, and Poetry Professor in the University of Oxford. ”

“ It might have been, the author felt a growing incapacity for the task.
Warton was a scholar and an antiquarian. To such a man, old books, written in an obsolete style, afforded positive pleasure. The difficulties that deterred ordinary readers were a fascination to him and who so capable as he to estimate the worth of those antique effusions, and to assign them their deserved position in the scale of literary merit? ”