violence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angry
pedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton
when examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "never
having consulted or even seen" the books he quotes from, and of
intentionally swindling the public, was in private life a vegetarian who
is said to have turned his orphan nephew on to the streets because he
caught him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far and wide,
for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself "that great luminary, or rather
dark lantern of literature."

If we turn over Ritson's distasteful pages, it is only to obtain from
them further proof of the perception of Warton's Romanticism by an
adversary whom hatred made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the _History of
English Poetry_ for presuming to have "rescued from oblivion irregular
beauties" of which no one desired to be reminded. He charges Warton with
recommending the poetry of "our Pagan fathers" because it is untouched
by Christianity, and of saying that "religion and poetry are
incompatible." He accuses him of "constantly busying himself with
passages which he does not understand, because they appeal to his ear
or his fancy." "Old poetry," Ritson says to Warton, "is the same thing
to you, sense or nonsense." He dwells on Warton's marked attraction to
whatever is prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these
accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but Ritson had
penetration, and without knowing what he reached, in some of these
diatribes he pierced to the heart of the Romanticist fallacy.

It is needful that I should bring these observations to a close. I hope
I have made good my claim that it was the Wartons who introduced into
the discussion of English poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a
metaphor of which both of them would have approved, that principle was