t writers who have not, he
thought, "been able to express themselves with beauty and propriety in
the fetters of verse."[1] And Thomas Warton quoted evidently only once
from Sidney's verse,[1] and then only by way of _England's
Helicon_.[2] The omission of Sidney, then, is the glaring defect; of the
dozen or so other Elizabethan sonnet collections which escaped Warton,
most were absolutely or practically unknown, and none seem to have been
available to him in the Bodleian or the British Museum.

At the time of his death, on 21 May 1790, there were in print only
eleven sheets,[3] or eighty-eight pages, of the fourth and final volume,
which was scheduled to bring the history of English poetry down to the
close of the seventeenth century. For four years after the publication
of the third volume in 1781 Warton repeatedly promised to complete the
work,[4] and a notice at the end of his edition of Milton's _Minor
Poems_ advertised in 1785 the "speedy publication" of the fourth volume.
But to his printer Warton evidently sent nothing beyond Section XLVIII.
The present continuation was probably written during or shortly after
1782: it contains no reference to any publication after William Hayley's
_Essay on Epic Poetry_, which appeared in 1782; and according to Thomas
Caldecott, Warton for the last seven years of his life discontinued work
upon the _History_.[5]

The notes which Thomas Warton had made for the completion of the
_History_ were upon his death commandeered by his brother, Joseph, at
that time headmaster of Winchester College. Joseph Warton made some
halfhearted efforts to get on with the volume,[6] but neither Winchester
nor Wickham, whither he retired in 1793, was a proper place in which to
carry on the necessary research. Moreover he was much more interested in
editing Pope and Dryden; and securing advantageous contracts to edit
these poets whom he knew well, he let the _History_ slide.

Joseph Warton appears, however, to have touched up the present
continuation, for a few expansions seem to be in his script rather than
in his brother's. It is difficult to be positive in the discrimination
of hands here, as Thomas Warton's hand in this manuscript is quite
irregular. Pens of varying thicknesses were used; black ink was used for
the text and red ink for footnotes, and one note (16) was pencilled.
Moreover, certain passages appear to have been written during periods of
marked infirmity or haste and are legible onl