prised when
Joseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Pope
approaches _Eloisa to Abelard_ in the quality of being "truly poetical."
He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact that this is the one
composition in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, but
there was much more than that. So far as I am aware, _Eloisa to Abelard_
had never taken a high place with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless
because of its obsession with horror and passion. But when we read how

"o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence and a dead repose,"

and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and powerful appeals
which the poem makes to emotion unbridled by moral scruple, we have no
difficulty in perceiving why _Eloisa to Abelard_ exercised so powerful
an attraction on Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the
licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he rejoiced in
finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, faithless to his
formula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy with
the sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism
permitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance who
recognised with pleasure the tumult of the _Atys_ of Catullus and the
febrile sensibility of Sappho.

Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination was what English
poetry needed; that the lark had been shut up long enough in a gilded
cage. We have a glimpse of Thomas Warton introducing the study of the
great Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we see him
crowned with laurel in the common-room of Trinity College at the age of
nineteen. This was in the year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he
was already preparing his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_, which
came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford before he
was thirty. Both the brothers took great pleasure in the study of
Spenser, and they both desired that the supernatural "machinery" of
Ariosto, in common with the romance of _The Faerie Queene_, should be
combined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled as
possible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The Painted
Window," describes himself as

"A faithless truant to the classic page,
Long have I loved to catch