o prove that "a clear head
and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The
custom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profound
moral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the
overwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had taken
this position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry in
him had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into a
sort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the _Epilogue to the
Satires_, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age,
may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the _Essay_
made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his right
place, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate the
extreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, by
the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than that
of the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he was
not preferred to them all.

Warton admitted but three supreme English poets--Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton--and he vehemently insisted that moral, didactic and panegyrical
poetry could never rise above the second class in importance. To assert
this was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy of Pope,
but it was to flout the claims of all those others to whom the age gave
allegiance. Joseph Warton does not shrink from doing this, and he gives
reason for abating the claims of all the classic favourites--Cowley,
Waller, Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him that he showed
arrogance in placing his opinion against that of a multitude of highly
trained judges, he replied that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry"
is a rare quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination" possessed by
few. When the _dicta_ of Boileau were quoted against him, he repudiated
their authority with scarcely less vivacity than Keats was to display
half a century later.

Joseph Warton's _Essay_ wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselves
more interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in the
detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the
value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a
poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so
ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but
nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be sur