alian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had
fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague
was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without
unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to
make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This
tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and
it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson
were presently received. The earliest specimens of _Ossian_ were
revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of
any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The
brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation,
and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies,
genii, giants, and monsters," the laugh was really at the expense of his
school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed his
boyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior.

Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, though
he held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to the
brothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of
revival," and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:--

"Phrase that time hath flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet."

This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a general
tendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature of
words and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later,
a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being
dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national
vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for
glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own
writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of
the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with
the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by
embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton,
who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas,
was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowley
forgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediaeval colouring by transferring
words out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexico