the traditional school reacted in two ways,--derisive and hortatory.
Pope, Young, and Swift satirized with masterful skill the inherent
weaknesses and follies of mankind, the vigor of their strokes drawing
from the sentimentalist Whitehead the feeble but significant protest,
_On Ridicule_, deprecating satire as discouraging to benevolence. On the
other hand, Wesley's hymns fervently summoned to repentance and piety;
while Young's _Night Thoughts_, yielding to the new influence only in its
form (blank verse), reasserted the hollowness of earthly existence,
the justice of God's stern will, and the need of faith in heavenly
immortality as the only adequate satisfaction of the spiritual elements
in Man. The literary powers of Pope, Swift, and Young were far superior
to those of the opposed school, which might have been overborne had not a
second generation of sentimentalists arisen to voice its claims in a more
poetical manner.

These newcomers,--Akenside, J.G. Cooper, the Wartons, and Collins,--all
of them very young, appeared between 1744 and 1747; and each rendered
distinct service to their common cause. The least original of the group,
John Gilbert Cooper, versified in _The Power of Harmony_ Shaftesbury's
cosmogony. More independently, Mark Akenside developed out of the same
doctrine of universal harmony the theory of aesthetics that was to guide
the school,--the theory that the true poet is created not by culture and
discipline at all, but owes to the impress of Nature--that beauty which
is goodness--his imagination, his taste, and his moral vision. Though
comparatively ardent and free in manner, Akenside pursued the customary,
didactic method. Less abstract, more nearly an utterance of personal
feeling, was Joseph Warton's _Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature_,
historically a remarkable poem, which, through its expression of the
author's tastes and preferences, indicated briefly some of the most
important touchstones of the sentimentalism (_videlicet_, "romanticism")