to them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the _ampolla_, which Astolpho
was expected to bring down from heaven in the _Orlando Furioso_. If I
have given you an exaggerated idea of the extent to which they foresaw
the momentous change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt by
extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, and by putting
them together, the critic may produce an effect which is too emphatic.
But you will be on your guard against such misdirection. It is enough
for me if you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers,
and I do not think that it can be contested.

Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the most
distinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and he
appealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. The
brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in
starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps
and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They
began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no
store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide
as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on
to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and
vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers,
while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was
present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their
social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style
in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they
succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes
no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made
some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving
at Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow