insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult
literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of
Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty
magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary
caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised
the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that
epic poetry--and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser--would
never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had
been in vogue.

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and
no other part of the _Observations_ is so valuable as the pages in which
those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former
poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently
fantastic in the plot of the _Orlando Furioso_. On that point he says,
"The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and
fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no
chivalry in _The Schoolmistress_, that accomplished piece was the
indirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had
fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague
was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without
unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to
make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This
tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and
it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson
were presently received. The earliest specimens of _Ossian_ were
revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of
any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The
brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation,
and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies,