s, "The Enthusiast," was
stated to have been written in 1740, when he was eighteen and his
brother only twelve years of age. It is, of course, possible that these
verses, which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up at a
later date. But this could only be a matter of diction, of revision, and
we are bound to accept the definite and repeated statement of Joseph,
that they were essentially composed in 1740. If we accept this as a
fact, "The Enthusiast" is seen to be a document of extraordinary
importance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the poem, which it
would be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in a phrase which has been much
discussed, dismissed the poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had
"no choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by this to
stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is jejune, verbose, and
poor. He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself with
creative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us,
which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian
versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact that here,
for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated what
was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "The
Enthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against the
classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature
for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Warton
that it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have come
under the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love and
idleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not
to write anything characteristic until ten years later.

But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurred
to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from Joseph
Warton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate
contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the same
relation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a young
poet to-day; the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ dates from 1724, and Allan
Ramsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us.
But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, they
were accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These we
find for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the
old