_Essay on Pope_, though written with such studied moderation that we
may, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shocking
to the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universal
disfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moral
courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who,
alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholy
solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was to
be one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and who
dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nerves
of all genuine poetry."

Warton's _Essay on the Genius of Pope_ is not well arranged, and, in
spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much
attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which
is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was
advanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear head
and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The
custom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profound
moral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the
overwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had taken
this position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry in
him had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into a
sort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the _Epilogue to the
Satires_, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age,
may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the _Essay_
made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his right
place, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate the
extreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, by
the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than that
of the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he was