The suddenness of Whitehead’s decease came near leaving a royal birthday unsung,—­an omission scarcely pardonable with one of George the Third’s methodical habits.  An impromptu appointment had to be made.  It was made before the Laureate was buried.  Thomas Warton, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, received the patent on the 30th of April, and his ode, married to fitting music, was duly forthcoming on the 24th of May.  The selection of Warton was faultless.  His lyrical verse was the best of a vicious school; his sonnets, according to that exquisite sonneteer, Sir Egerton Brydges, were the finest in the language; his “History of English Poetry,” of which three volumes had appeared, displayed an intimate acquaintance with the early English writers.  Nor should we pass unnoticed his criticisms and annotations upon Milton and Spenser, manifesting as they did the acutest sensitiveness to the finest beauties of poetry.  If the laurel implied the premiership of living poets, Warton certainly deserved it.  He was a head and shoulders taller than his actual contemporaries.[16] He stood in the gap between the old school and the new, between the dead and the coming.  Goldsmith and Johnson were no more; Cowper did not print his “Task” until the autumn of 1785; Burns made his debut about the same moment; Rogers published his “Ode to Superstition” the next year; the famous “Fourteen Sonnets” of Bowles came two years later; while Wordsworth and Landor made their first appearance in 1793.  Fortunate thus in time, Warton was equally fortunate in politics.  He was an Oxford Tory, a firm believer in divine right and passive obedience, and a warm supporter of the new ministers.  To the King, it may be added, no nomination could have given greater satisfaction.  The official odes of Warton evince all the elegant traits which characterize his other writings.  Their refined taste and exquisite modulation are admirable; while the matter is far less sycophantic than was to be expected from so devout a monarchist.  The tender of the laurel certainly gratified him:—­

  “Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure
  Nor useless all my vacant days have flowed,
  From youth’s gay dawn to manhood’s prime mature,
  Nor with the Muse’s laurel unbestowed."[17]

And, like Southey, he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers.  The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks.  Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of “Peter Pindar,” he escaped scathless,—­gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary proportion of poetical panegyric.

  “Affection and applause alike he shared;
  All loved the man, all venerate the bard: 
  E’en Prejudice his fate afflicted hears,
  And lettered Envy sheds reluctant tears. 
  Such worth the laurel could alone repay,
  Profaned by Cibber, and contemned by Gray;
  Yet hence its Breath shall new distinction claim,
  And, though it gave not, take from Warton fame."[18]