confined to classical topics. Only one of them was printed. It was entitled ‘De Poesi Græcorum Bucolica,’ and was included in Warton's edition of Theocritus. While holding the professorship he seems to have almost abandoned his study of English literature for the Latin and Greek classics. In 1758 he published a selection of Latin metrical inscriptions (‘Inscriptionum Romanarum Metricarum Delectus’); and eight years later he reprinted, with an original Latin preface, a similar collection of Greek inscriptions, known as Cephalas' ‘Anthologiæ Græcæ.’ In 1770 appeared from the Clarendon Press Warton's elegant edition of Theocritus, with some notes by Jonathan Toup [q. v.] The book met with approbation at home, but its scholarship was deemed by continental scholars to be defective; in England it was superseded by the editions of Thomas Gaisford in his ‘Poetæ Græci Minores’ (1814–20), and of Christopher Wordsworth (1844).
On 7 Dec. 1767 Warton took his degree of B.D., in 1771 he was elected a fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries, and on 22 Oct. of that year he was appointed to the small living of Kiddington in Oxfordshire.
Meanwhile Warton had embarked on his great venture of a history of English poetry. Pope had contemplated such a work, and prepared an elaborate plan, which his biographer, Owen Ruffhead, printed. Gray, about 1761, also sketched out a history of English poetry, but he likewise never got beyond a preliminary sketch. In 1768 Gray wrote that he had long since dropped his design, ‘especially after he heard that it was already in the hands of a person [i.e. Warton] well qualified to do it justice, both by his taste and his researches into antiquity.’ Warton sent his first volume to press in 1769. Many months later, on 15 April 1770, Gray, acting on the suggestion of Hurd, sent Warton his skeleton plan, in which the poets were dealt with not chronologically, but in groups according to their critical affinities (Gray, Works, i. 53, iii. 365). Warton's work was then far advanced on more or less strictly chronological lines, and he made no change in his scheme after reading Gray's notes. Warton's history owes nothing to Gray.
In 1774 the first volume of Warton's history of English poetry appeared under the title of ‘History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century; to which are prefixed Two Dissertations: 1. On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe; 2. On the Introduction of Learning into England.’ The second volume appeared in 1778; and the third in 1781, preceded by an additional dissertation on the ‘Gesta Romanorum.’ This volume brought the history down to the end of Queen Elizabeth's age. The fourth volume, which would have carried the topic as far as Pope, though repeatedly promised, never appeared. Another edition, edited by Richard Price (1790–1833) [q. v.], appeared in 1824, with numerous notes from the writings of Ritson, Douce, Ashby, Park, and others, and the work was re-edited by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1874, when Warton's text was ruthlessly abbreviated or extended in an ill-advised attempt to bring its information up to the latest level of philological research.
At the outset Warton's great undertaking was cautiously received. In so massive a collection of facts and dates errors were inevitable. Warton's arrangement of his material was not flawless. Digressions were very numerous. His translation of old French and English was often faulty. In 1782 Ritson attacked him on the last score with a good deal of bitterness, and Warton, while contemptuously refusing to notice the censures of the ‘black-letter dog,’ was conscious that much of the attack was justified. Horace Walpole found the work unentertaining, and Mason echoed that opinion. Subsequently Sir Walter Scott, impressed by its deficiencies of plan, viewed it as ‘an immense commonplace book of memoirs to serve for’ a history; and Hallam deprecated enthusiastic eulogy. On the other hand, Gibbon described it as illustrating ‘the taste of a poet and the minute diligence of an antiquarian,’ while Christopher North wrote appreciatively of the volumes as ‘a mine.’ But, however critics have differed in the past, the whole work is now seen to be impregnated by an intellectual vigour which reconciles the educated reader to almost all its irregularities and defects. 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; while for the student of sixteenth-century literature, Warton's results have been at many points developed, but have not as a whole been superseded. His style is unaffected and invariably clear. He never forgot that he was the historian and not the critic of the literature of which he treated. He handled with due precision the bibliographical side of his subject, and extended equal thoroughness of investigation
