seph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to
nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be
characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of
mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering
primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion
for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the
picturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon
behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of

"the pine-topped precipice
Abrupt and shaggy."

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to
the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a
decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must
wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly
impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved
to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that

"God and Nature link'd the general frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same."

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or
pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live

"With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild,
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves,"

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle
in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an
abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the
"little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale"
in Pope's complacent _Fourth Epistle_, but an aeolian harp hung in some
cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.

"Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd
To smoky cities."

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of Rene, of Byron.

Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran the
mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To
comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as
Parnell's _Hermit_ or Addison's _Campaign_ could be regarded as
satisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we must
realise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to be
mentioned by its technical--or even by its exact name; no clear picture
was to be raised before the inn