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The Augustan Reprint Society

THOMAS WARTON

_A History of English Poetry_: an Unpublished Continuation

Edited, with an Introduction, by Rodney M. Baine

Publication Number 39

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1953

GENERAL EDITORS

H. RICHARD ARCHER, _Clark Memorial Library_
RICHARD C. BOYS, _University of Michigan_
RALPH COHEN, _University of California, Los Angeles_
VINTON A. DEARING, _University of California, Los Angeles_

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_

ADVISORY EDITORS

EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_
BENJAMIN BOYCE, _Duke University_
LOUIS BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_
JOHN BUTT, _King's College, University of Durham_
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_
LOUIS A. LANDA, _Princeton University_
SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_
EARNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_
JAMES SUTHERLAND, _University College, London_
H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

EDNA C. DAVIS, _Clark Memorial Library_




INTRODUCTION


Among the unpublished papers of Thomas and Joseph Warton at Winchester
College the most interesting and important item is undoubtedly a
continuation of Thomas Warton's _History of English Poetry_. This
continuation completes briefly the analysis of Elizabethan satire and
discusses the Elizabethan sonnet. The discussion offers material of
interest particularly for the bibliographer and the literary historian.
The bibliographer, for example, will be intrigued by a statement of
Thomas Warton that he had examined a copy of the _Sonnets_ published in
1599--a decade before the accepted date of the first edition. The
literary historian will be interested in, inter alia, unpublished
information concerning the university career of Samuel Daniel and in the
theory that Shakespeare's sonnets should be interpreted as if addressed
by a woman to her lover.

Critically appraised, Warton's treatment of the Elizabethan sonnet seems
skimpy. To dismiss the sonnet in one third the amount of space devoted
to Joseph Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ seems to betray a want of proportion.
Perhaps even more damaging may seem the fact that Warton failed to
mention more sonnet collections than he discussed. About twenty years
later, in 1802, Joseph Ritson listed in his _Bibliographia Poetica_ the
sonnet collections of Barnaby Barnes, Thomas Lodge, William Percy, and
John Soowthern--all evidently unknown to Warton. But Warton was not
particularly slipshod in his researches. In his immediately preceding
section, on Elizabethan satire, he had stopped at 1600; and in the
continuation he deliberately omitted the sonnet collections published
after that date. Thus, though he had earlier in the _History_ (III, 264,
n.) promised a discussion of Drayton, he omitted him here because his
sonnets were continually being augmented until 1619. Two sixteenth
century collections which Warton had mentioned earlier in the _History_
(III, 402, n.) he failed to discuss here, William Smith's _Chloris_
(1596) and Henry Lock's _Sundry Christian Passions, contayned in two
hundred Sonnets_ (1593). Concerning Lock he had quoted significantly
(IV, 8-9) from _The Return from Parnassus_: "'Locke and Hudson, sleep
you quiet shavers among the shavings of the press, and let your books
lie in some old nook amongst old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my
censure.'" A collection which certainly did not need to avoid censure
was Sir Philip Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_; and for Warton's total
neglect of Sidney's sonnets it seems difficult to account, for in this
section on the sonnet Sidney as a poet would have been most aptly
discussed. The _Astrophel and Stella_ was easily available in
eighteenth-century editions of Sidney's works, and Warton admired the
author. Both Thomas and Joseph Warton, however, venerated Sidney mainly
for his _Arcadia_ and his _Apology for Poetry_. For Joseph Warton,
Sidney was the prime English exhibit