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Some Diversions of a Man of Letters by Edmund William Gosse
page 66 of 330 (20%)
effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in
English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to
the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the
powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing
had been suggested in the pure Romantic style.

In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to
nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be
characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of
mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering
primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion
for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the
picturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon
behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of

"the pine-topped precipice
Abrupt and shaggy."

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to
the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a
decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must
wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly
impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved
to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that

"God and Nature link'd the general frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same."

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or
pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live
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