enthusiastically in the forest he formed a determination to reconquer
the realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct became a
purpose, we may say that the great Romantic Movement, such as it has
enlarged and dwindled down to our own day, took its start. The Wartons
were not men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose or
verse, have not taken hold of the national memory. But the advance of a
great army is not announced by a charge of field-marshals. In the
present war, the advance of the enemy upon open cities has generally
been announced by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds
of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the bicyclist-scouts who
prophesied of an advance which was nearly fifty years delayed.

The general history of English literature in the eighteenth century
offers us little opportunity for realising what the environment could be
of two such lads as the Wartons, with their enthusiasm, their
independence, and their revolutionary instinct. But I will take the year
1750, which is the year of Rousseau's first _Discours_ and therefore the
definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You will perhaps find
it convenient to compare the situation of the Wartons with what is the
situation to-day of some very modern or revolutionary young poet. In
1750, then, Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-two.
Pope had died six years before, and this was equivalent to the death of
Swinburne in the experience of our young man of to-day. Addison's death
was as distant as is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, who
had been dead two years, had left The _Castle of Indolence_ as an
equivalent to Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_. All the leading writers of the age
of Anne--except Young, who hardly belonged to it--were dead, but the
Wartons were divided from them only as we are from those of the age of
Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant from them than
Swinburne is from us, but really a more just parallel is with Tennyson.