the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme,"

and again he says:--

"I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age,"

that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore."

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather
disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of
literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he
followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge.
His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too
tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother
in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call
Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke
of with respect. He warmly recommends the _Morte d'Arthur_, which had
probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben
Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the
charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste
of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The
public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons,
and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in
insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult
literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of
Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty
magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary
caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised
the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that
epic poetry--and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser--would
never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had
been in vogue.

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and
no other part of the _Observations_ is so valuable as the pages in which
those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former
poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently
fantastic in the plot of the _Orlando Furioso_. On that point he says,
"The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and
fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no
chivalry in _The Schoolmistress_, that accomplished piece was the
indirect outcome of the It