combined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled as
possible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The Painted
Window," describes himself as

"A faithless truant to the classic page,
Long have I loved to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme,"

and again he says:--

"I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age,"

that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore."

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather
disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of
literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he
followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge.
His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too
tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother
in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call
Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke
of with respect. He warmly recommends the _Morte d'Arthur_, which had
probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben
Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the
charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste
of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The
public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons,
and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in