for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated what
was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "The
Enthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against the
classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature
for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Warton
that it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have come
under the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love and
idleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not
to write anything characteristic until ten years later.

But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurred
to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from Joseph
Warton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate
contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the same
relation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a young
poet to-day; the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ dates from 1724, and Allan
Ramsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us.
But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, they
were accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These we
find for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the
old formulas and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very
interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws of poetical
practice is his solicitude for the sensations of the individual. These
had been reduced to silence by the neo-classic school in its
determination to insist on broad Palladian effects of light and line.
The didactic and moral aim of the poets had broken the springs of
lyrical expression, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those
indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of a romantic
spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, by reticence and
vagueness.