but they had no native richness of expression, no
store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide
as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on
to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and
vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers,
while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was
present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their
social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style
in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they
succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes
no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made
some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving
at Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow
cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph felt
the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining
more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between
1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make
itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the
poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint
conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbe Du Bos had laid down
in his celebrated _Reflexions_ (1719) that the poet's art consists of
making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and
embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted
upon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first to
perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all
imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful
attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due
to Joseph and Thomas Warton.

[Footnote 4: Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the British
Academy, October 27th, 1915.]

THE CHARM OF STERNE[5]

It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, at
Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment just
home from the Low Countries. "My birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us,
"was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with
many other brave officers, broke and sent a