elected Professor of Poetry, a post which he held for ten
years. During this time he planned a complete History of English Poetry,
a task which Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and abandoned. The
historical interest which is so conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not
a little, it may be remarked in passing, to the initiative of Pope, who
must therefore be given a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic
family. Warton's _History_, so far as it was completed, was published
between 1774 and 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up lesser
tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate on the strength of his early
poems and later scholarship. He died in 1790.

Warton's poems are a curious study. Spenser and Milton are his masters,
and he is a docile pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might be
best described as imitation poetry. Christopher North said of him that
"the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet," a saying which contains
the whole truth. He puts together a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his
teachers, and frames them in a sentimental setting of his own. Here are
some passages from _The Pleasures of Melancholy_, which, though he wrote
it at the age of seventeen, does not differ in method or inspiration from
the rest of his poetical work:

Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve,
Where thro' some western window the pale moon
Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light;
While sullen sacred silence reigns around,
Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r
Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp,
Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves
Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green
Invests some wasted tow'r. . . .
Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close,
Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam
The dying embers scatter, far remote
From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd roof
Resound with festive echo, let me sit,
Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . .
O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought!
O come with saintly look, and steadfast step,
From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew,
Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound
List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind
Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son.

Melancholy seems not to have answered these advances. In later life
Warton was a short, squat, red-f