great army is not announced by a charge of field-marshals. In the
present war, the advance of the enemy upon open cities has generally
been announced by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds
of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the bicyclist-scouts who
prophesied of an advance which was nearly fifty years delayed.

The general history of English literature in the eighteenth century
offers us little opportunity for realising what the environment could be
of two such lads as the Wartons, with their enthusiasm, their
independence, and their revolutionary instinct. But I will take the year
1750, which is the year of Rousseau's first _Discours_ and therefore the
definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You will perhaps find
it convenient to compare the situation of the Wartons with what is the
situation to-day of some very modern or revolutionary young poet. In
1750, then, Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-two.
Pope had died six years before, and this was equivalent to the death of
Swinburne in the experience of our young man of to-day. Addison's death
was as distant as is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, who
had been dead two years, had left The _Castle of Indolence_ as an
equivalent to Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_. All the leading writers of the age
of Anne--except Young, who hardly belonged to it--were dead, but the
Wartons were divided from them only as we are from those of the age of
Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant from them than
Swinburne is from us, but really a more just parallel is with Tennyson.
The Wartons, wandering in their woodlands, were confronted with a
problem such as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, in
considering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning.

There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close examination of such
documents as remain to us, that Joseph Warton, whose attitude has
hitherto been strangely neglected, was in fact the active force in this
remarkable revolt against existing conventions in the world of
imaginative art. His six years of priority would naturally give him an
advantage over his now better-known and more celebrated brother.
Moreover, we have positive evidence of the firmness of his opinions at a
time when his brother Thomas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's
_Odes_ of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which admits of
no question. But the most remarkable of his poem