"the affections and internal senses depraved by vice."

The most important innovation suggested by Joseph Warton was an
outspoken assertion that this was by no means the object or the proper
theme of poetry. His verses and those of his brother, the _Essay on
Pope_ of the elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger,
may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral or didactic
sentiment. The instructive and ethical mannerisms of the later
classicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse,
especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excluded
self-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but
who was in several respects a better critic than either Addison or
himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edged
away from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feels
things æsthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The result
was that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didactic
reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the only
relief, since

"who could take offence
While pure description held the place of sense?"

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton's
most remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or
rather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is
first foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast," and when the history of the
school comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing an
antinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of,
Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less
remarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism