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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_A History of English Poetry_: an Unpublished Continuation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Among the unpublished papers of Thomas and Joseph Warton at Winchester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literary historian will be interested in, inter alia, unpublished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 of great writers who have not, he
thought, "been able to express themselves with beauty and propriety in
the fetters of verse."[1] And Thomas Warton quoted evidently only once
from Sidney's verse,[1] and then only by way of _England's
Helicon_.[2] The omission of Sidney, then, is the glaring defect; of the
dozen or so other Elizabethan sonnet collections which escaped Warton,
most were absolutely or practically unknown, and none seem to have been
available to him in the Bodleian or the British Museum.

At the time of his death, on 21 May 1790, there were in print only
eleven sheets,[3] or eighty-eight pages, of the fourth and final volume,
which was scheduled to bring the history of English poetry down to the
close of the seventeenth century. For four years after the publication
of the third volume in 1781 Warton repeatedly promised to complete the
work,[4] and a notice at the end of his edition of Milton's _Minor
Poems_ advertised in 1785 the "speedy publication" of the fourth volume.
But to his printer Warton evidently sent nothing beyond Section XLVIII.
The present continuation was probably written during or shortly after
1782: it contains no reference to any publication after William Hayley's
_Essay on Epic Poetry_, which appeared in 1782; and according to Thomas
Caldecott, Warton for the last seven years of his life discontinued work
upon the _History_.[5]

The notes which Thomas Warton had made for the completion of the
_History_ were upon his death commandeered by his brother, Joseph, at
that time headmaster of Winchester College. Joseph Warton made some
halfhearted efforts to get on with the volume,[6] but neither Winchester
nor Wickham, whither he retired in 1793, was a proper place in which to
carry on the necessary research. Moreover he was much more interested in
editing Pope and Dryden; and securing advantageous contracts to edit
these poets whom he knew well, he let the _History_ slide.

Joseph Warton appears, however, to have touched up the present
continuation, for a few expansions seem to be in his script rather than
in his brother's. It is difficult to be positive in the discrimination
of hands here, as Thomas Warton's hand in this manuscript is quite
irregular. Pens of varying thicknesses were used; black ink was used for
the text and red ink for footnotes, and one note (16) was pencilled.
Moreover, certain passages appear to have been written during periods of
marked infirmity or haste and are legible only with difficulty if at
all. In any case, those additions which were presumably made by Joseph
Warton merely expand the original version; they do not alter or modify
any of Thomas Warton's statements.

In the text of the present edition the expansions which appear to be in
Joseph Warton's hand are placed within parentheses, which were not used
for punctuation in the text of the manuscript itself. Because of the
difficulties of reproduction, all small capitals have been translated
into lover case italics.

This continuation, discovered by the editor among the Warton papers in
the Moberly Library at Winchester College, is here published with the
kind permission of the Right Honorable Harold T. Baker and Sir George
Henry Gates, retired and present Wardens of Winchester College, and of
the Fellows of the College. The editor is indebted also to the Reverend
Mr. J. d'E. Firth, Assistant Master and Chaplain; and Mr. C. E. R.
Claribut and Mr. J. M. G. Blakiston, past and present Assistant Fellows'
Librarians. The Richmond Area University Center contributed a generous
grant-in-aid.

Rodney M. Baine

The University of Richmond

Richmond, Virginia




NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[1] Joseph Warton, _An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope_
(London, 1756-1782), I, 270-271.

[2] John Milton, _Poems upon Several Occasions_ (London, 1785), ed.
Thomas Warton, p. 331, n.

[3] Nineteenth-century editions of the _History_ give the false
impression that the eight sheets were prepared from manuscript material
left at Thomas Warton's death, but these sheets were certainly printed
before Thomas died, and probably in the early 1780's. See John Nichols,
_Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century_ (London, 1812-1816), III,
702-703. They contain no reference postdating that to Isaac Reed's
revised edition of Robert Dodsley's _Collection of Old Plays_, published
in 1780.

[4] Thomas Warton to Richard Price, 13 October 1781, in Thomas Warton,
_Poetical Works_, ed. Richard Mant (Oxford, 1802), I, lxxviii; Daniel
Prince to Richard Gough, 4 August 1783, in Nichols, _Literary
Anecdotes_, III, 702.

[5] Thomas Caldecott to Bishop Percy, 21 March 1803, in Nichols,
_Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century_
(London, 1817-1858), VIII, 372.

[6] Joseph Warton to William Hayley, 12 March 1792, in John Wooll,
_Biographical Memoirs of the late Revd. Joseph Warton_ (London, 1806),
p. 404.




A HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY: AN UNPUBLISHED CONTINUATION


(In enumerating so many of these petty Epigrammatists, I may have been
perhaps too prolix,--but I did it to shew the taste & turn of writing at
this time; & now proceed to observe, that, in the year, 1614,)[1] the
vogue which satire had acquired from Hall and Marston, probably
encouraged Barten Holiday of Christ-Church in Oxford, to translate
Persius, when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The first edition is
dated 1616. This version had four editions from its publication to the
year 1673 inclusive, notwithstanding the versification is uncommonly
scabrous. The success of his Persius induced Holiday to translate
Juvenal, a clearer & more translatable satirist. But both versions, as
Dryden has justly observed,[2] were written for scholars, and not for
the world: and by treading on the heels of his originals, he seems to
have hurt them by too near an approach. He seized the meaning but not
the spirit of his authors. Holiday, however, who was afterwards
graduated in divinity and promoted to an archdeaconry, wrote a comedy
called the _Marriage of the Arts_, acted before the court at
Woodstock-palace, which was even too grave and scholastic for king James
the first.

I close my prolix review of these pieces by remarking, that as our old
plays have been assembled and exhibited to the public in one uniform
view,[3] so a collection of our old satires and epigrams would be a
curious and useful publication. Even the dull and inelegant productions,
of a remote period which have real Life for their theme, become valuable
and important by preserving authentic pictures of antient popular
manners: by delineating the gradations of vice and folly, they furnish
new speculation to the moral historian, and at least contribute to the
illustration of writers of greater consequence.


_Sect._ XLIX.

The _Sonnet_, together with the _Ottava Rima_, seems to have been the
invention of the Provincial bards, but to have been reduced to its
present rhythmical prosody by some of the earliest Italian poets. It is
a short monody, or Ode of one stanza containing fourteen lines, with
uncommonly frequent returns of rhymes more or less combined. But the
disposition of the rhymes has been sometimes varied according to the
caprice or the convenience of the writer. There is a sonnet of the
regular construction in the Provincial dialect, written by Guglielmo de
gli Amalricchi, on Robert king of Naples who died in 1321.[4] But the
Italian language affords earlier examples. (The multitude of identical
cadences renders it a more easy and proper metre to use in Italian than
in English verse.)

No species of verse appears to have been more eagerly and universally
cultivated by the Italian poets, from the fourteenth century to the
present times. Even the gravest of their epic and tragic writers have
occasionally sported In these lighter bays. (A long list of them is
given in the beginning of the fourth Volume of Quadrios History of
Italian Poetry.) But perhaps the most elegant Italian sonnets are yet to
be found in Dante. Petrarch's sonnets are too learned (metaphysical) and
refined. Of Dante's compositions in this style I cannot give a better
idea, than in (the ingenious) Mr. Hayley's happy translation of Dante's
beautiful sonnet to his friend Guido Calvacanti [sic], written in his
youth, and probably before the year 1300.

    Henry! I wish that you, and Charles, and I,
      By some sweet spell within a bark were plac'd,
      A gallant bark with magic virtue grac'd,
      Swift at our will with every wind to fly:

    So that no changes of the shifting sky
      No stormy terrors of the watery waste,
      Might bar our course, but heighten still our taste
      Of sprightly joy, and of our social tie:

    Then, that my Lucy, Lucy fair and free,
      With those soft nymphs on whom your souls are bent,
      The kind magician might to us convey,

    To talk of love throughout the livelong day:
      And that each fair might be as well content
      As I in truth believe our hearts would be.[5]

We have before seen, that the _Sonnet_ was imported from Italy into
English poetry, by lord Surrey and Wyat, about the middle of the
sixteenth century. But it does not seem to have flourished in its
legitimate form, till towards the close of the reign of queen Elisabeth.
What I call the legitimate form, in which it now appeared, was not
always free from licentious innovations in the rythmical arrangement.

To omit Googe, Tuberville [sic], Gascoigne, and some other petty writers
who have interspersed their miscellanies with a few sonnets, and who
will be considered under another class, our first professed author in
this mode of composition, after Surrey and Wyat, is Samuel Daniel. His
_Sonnets_ called _Delia_, together with his _Complaint of Rosamond_,
were printed for Simon Waterson, in 1591.[6] It was hence that the name
of Delia, suggested to Daniel by Tibullus, has been perpetuated in the
song of the lover as the name of a mistress. These pieces are dedicated
to Sir Philip Sydney's sister, the general patroness, Mary countess of
Pembroke. But Daniel had been her preceptor.[7] It is not said in
Daniel's Life, that he travelled. His forty-eighth sonnet is said to
have been "made at the authors being in Italie."[8] Delia does not
appear to have been transcendently cruel, nor were his sufferings
attended with any very violent paroxysms of despair. His style and his
expressions have a coldness proportioned to his passion. Yet as he does
not weep seas of tears, nor utter sighs of fire, he has the merit of
avoiding the affected allusions and hyperbolical exaggerations of his
brethren. I cannot in the mean time, with all these concessions in his
favour, give him the praise of elegant sentiment, true tenderness, and
natural pathos. He has, however, a vigour of diction, and a volubility
of verse, which cover many defects, and are not often equalled by his
contemporaries. I suspect his sonnets were popular. They are commended,
by the author of the _Return from Parnassus_, in a high strain of
panegyric.

    Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage
    War with the proudest big _Italian_
    That melts his heart in sugar'd sonnetting.[9]

But I do not think they are either very sweet, or much tinctured with
the Italian manner. The following is one of the best; which I the rather
chuse to recite, as it exemplifies his mode of compliment, and contains
the writer's opinion of Spenser's use of obsolete words.

    Let others sing of knights & Paladines,
      In aged accents, and untimely words,
      Paint shadowes in imaginarie lines,
      Which well the reach of their high wit records;

    But I must sing of thee, and those faire eyes
      Autentique shall my verse in time to come,
      When yet th' vnborne shall say "Loe, where she lyes,
      Whose beauty made Him speak that els was dombe."

    These are the arkes, the trophies I erect,
      That fortifie thy name against old age,
      And these thy sacred vertues must protect
      Against the Darke, & Times consuming rage.
    Though th' errour of my youth they shall discouer,
    Suffise, they shew I liu'd, and was thy louer.[10]

But, to say nothing more, whatever wisdom there may be in allowing that
love was the errour of his youth, there was no great gallantry in
telling this melancholy truth to the lady.

Daniel is a multif