The History of English Poetry

Warton's History had all the advantages and disadvantages of a pioneering work. Being almost the first work to give general readers any information on Middle English poetry it had the attraction of novelty, leading to a generally favourable response to the first edition. The Gentleman's Magazine, reviewing the first volume, called it "this capital historical piece", and had no doubt that "every connoisseur will be curious to view the original, and impatient for the completion of it". Of the third volume the same magazine wrote that it "does equal credit to Mr. Warton's taste, judgment, and erudition, and makes us impatiently desirous of more".^[4][15] Edward Gibbon mentioned the History in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, saying it had been accomplished "with the taste of a poet and the minute diligence of an antiquarian".^[13] But the praise was not unanimous. Horace Walpole and William Mason both professed themselves annoyed by Warton's habit of throwing in illustrative material indiscriminately.^[13] A more dangerous attack came from Joseph Ritson, whose pamphlet Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry, bitterly tore into Warton for the many mistranscriptions, misinterpretations, and errors of fact that his book, as the very first attempt to map the Middle English world, inevitably contained.^[16] This led to a long and sometimes ill-tempered correspondence in the journals between Warton, Ritson, and their respective supporters. Ritson kept up the attack in successive books through the rest of his life, culminating in the viciously personal "Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy" in 1802.^[17][18]

By the time the dust had settled from this controversy everyone was aware that the History could not be implicitly trusted, but it continued to be loved by a new generation whose taste for the older English poetry Warton's book, along with Percy's Reliques, had formed. The influence of those two books on the growth of the Romantic spirit can be illustrated by Robert Southey, who wrote that they had confirmed in him a love of Middle English that had been formed by his discovery of Chaucer; and by Walter Scott's description of the History as "an immense commonplace book…from the perusal of which we rise, our fancy delighted with beautiful imagery and with the happy analysis of ancient tale and song".^[19][20][4]

In 1899 Sidney Lee wrote that

Even the mediæval expert of the present day, who finds that much of Warton's information is superannuated and that many of his generalisations have been disproved by later discoveries, realises that nowhere else has he at his command so well furnished an armoury of facts and dates about obscure writers.^[21]

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica confirmed that "his book is still indispensable to the student of English poetry".^[11] Though Warton's History no longer enjoys the same position as an authority on early poetry, it is still appreciated. Arthur Johnston wrote that

To the modern scholar reading Warton, it is not his errors in transcripts or dating which attract attention; it is rather the richness of his information, the wealth of documentation, the multitude of his discoveries, his constant alertness to the problems and awareness of the ramifications of his subject.^[22]

Notes