th pensive regret, "severer Reason"--the real
eighteenth-century divinity--"scans the scene with philosophic ken,"
and--being a Protestant--reflects that, after all, the monastic houses
were "Superstition's shrine" and their demolition was a good thing for
Science and Religion.

The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton rendered to the studies
that he loved was his "History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the
Close of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, published
respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The fragment of a fourth volume
was issued in 1790. A revised edition in four volumes was published in
1824, under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, augmented, and
annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, Ashby, and the editor himself. In 1871
appeared a new revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew
Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by well-known English
scholars like Madden, Skeat, Furnivall, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis
Wright. It should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of
Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. Much of his
learning is out of date, and the modern editors of his history--Price and
Hazlitt--seem to the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their
footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back statements that
Warton had made in the text. The leading position, _e.g._, of his
preliminary dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in
Europe"--deriving it from the Spanish Arabs--has long since been
discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if not exact; and it was
not dry learning, but quickened by the spirit of a genuine man of
letters. Therefore, in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his
history remains readable, as a body of descriptive criticism, or a
continuous literary essay. The best way to read it is to read it as it
was written--in the original edition--disregarding the apparatus of
notes, which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but remembering
that it is no longer an authority and probably needs correcting on every
page. Read thus, it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its
way," as Lowell has said. Southey, too, affirmed that its publication
formed an epoch in literary history; and that, with Percy's "Reliques,"
it had promoted, beyond any other work, the "growth of a better taste
than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding."

Gray had schemed a his