Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat their
definition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of them
advanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to have
succumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he
became head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious
escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of a
great public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the Classical
Greeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a
man of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, as
disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blest
delusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest;
still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism of
those who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, and
who made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of
"enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that
"the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion
Service was remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that he
carried a "Gothick" manner into daily life.

The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the Wartons, took its
revenge upon Thomas in the form of a barren demon named Joseph Ritson,
who addressed to him in 1782 what he aptly called _A Familiar Letter_.
There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole history of
literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a hornet and the same
insect's inability to produce honey of his own, was considered by the
reactionaries to have "punched Tom Warton's historick body full of
deadly holes." But his strictures were not really important. In
marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple of
dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and a