But the imagination of England was now beginning to be impatient of
these bonds. It was getting tired of a rest-cure so prolonged. It asked
for more colour, more exuberance, more precise reproduction of visual
impressions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to greater lengths
the instinct for scenery which had never entirely died out in England,
except for a few years after the Restoration. It was left to Joseph
Warton, however, to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage of
landscape was shredded into the classical _pot-au-feu_. He proposes
that, in place of the mention of "Idalia's groves," when Windsor Forest
is intended, and of milk-white bulls sacrificed to Phoebus at
Twickenham, the poets should boldly mention in their verses English
"places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards,
and wizards," and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a model far
superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references to
objects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination.
Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and
allusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He very
pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinary
cleverness--which was to be read, more than half a century later, even
by Wordsworth, with pleasure--confines himself to rural beauty in
general, and declines to call up before us the peculiar beauties which
characterise the Forest of Windsor.

A specimen of Joseph Warton's descriptive poetry may here be given, not
for its great inherent excellence, but because it shows his resistance
to the obstinate classic mannerism:--

"Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell,
To thy unknown sequestered cell,