to you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth century
from a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname
warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a Warton
Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which a
lecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in which
you indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task the
easier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for
you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as it
existed up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating to
the Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which was
fashionable and popular among the best readers in their day.

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are apt to
neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic pleasure
experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, at any epoch of
history. We are far too much in the habit of supposing that what
we--that is the most instructed and sensitive of us--admire now must
always have been admired by people of a like condition. This has been
one of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people as
illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing generations as
if it were not only heretical, but despicable as well. Young men to-day
speak of those who fifty years ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson
as though they were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked,
neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly analogous to
themselves that those portions of Tennyson were adored which the young
repudiate to-day. Not to expand too largely this question of the
oscillation of taste--which, however, demands more careful examination
than it has hitherto received--it is always important to discover what
was honestly admired at a given date by the most enthusiastic and
intelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. But