SOURCE: Kolb, Gwin J. and Robert DeMaria, Jr. “Thomas Warton's Observations on the ‘Faerie Queene’ of Spenser, Samuel Johnson's ‘History of the English Language,’ and Warton's History of English Poetry: Reciprocal Indebtedness?” Philological Quarterly 74, no. 3 (1995): 327-35.

In the following essay, Kolb and DeMaria analyze the relationship between Warton and Samuel Johnson, arguing that the two writers influenced and borrowed from each other.

Several commentators have discussed in varying detail the long, sometimes troubled friendship of Samuel Johnson and Thomas Warton, which began in the early 1750s (when Johnson was in his forties and Warton in his twenties) and apparently lasted until the former's death in 1784; and the same investigators have usually treated some of the numerous literary relationships obtaining between the two men.¹ But no one, so far as we are aware, has pointed out the possible connections between Warton's Observations on the “Faerie Queene” of Spenser (1754) and...