SOURCE: Curry, Stephen J. “The Literary Criticism of William Warburton.” English Studies 48, no. 5 (October 1967): 398-408.

In the following essay, Curry compares Warburton's status as an important eighteenth-century literary critic with his diminished reputation in the twentieth century.

The literary criticism of William Warburton came when the great Augustan critics had died, before the later period of Johnson, Reynolds, Hurd, and the Wartons had yet begun. These decades of the 1730's through the 1750's are valuable for the great advances in philosophy by Hume and others—studies which were later to change critical thought permanently; yet the literary criticism of the age mainly reviews the critical battles of the Augustans. Because of so much retracing of ground, this period has gives nothing of permanent immediate value to literary study; nevertheless, we can understand much of later eighteenth-century criticism if we look at certain currents of thought during the interim...