eager students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British antiquities.  So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets.  But their work was quite unoriginal.  Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson, Spenser, Shakspere, Gray.  They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow’s dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist.  Like Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic past: 

    “Tales that have the rime of age,
    And chronicles of eld.”

The closing lines of Thomas Warton’s sonnet “Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon"[8]—­a favorite with Charles Lamb—­might have been written by Longfellow: 

    “Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
    Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.”

Joseph Warton’s pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger brother’s.  Much of Thomas Warton’s poetry, such as his facetiae in the “Oxford Sausage” and his “Triumph of Isis,” had an academic flavor.  These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries.  So, too, with most of his annual laureate odes, “On his Majesty’s Birthday,” etc.  Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls “the memorials of our forefathers’ piety or splendor.”  Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates “the Druid harp” sounding “through the gloom profound of forests hoar”; the fanes and castles built by the Normans; and the

    “—­bright hall where Odin’s Gothic throne
    With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone.”

But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton’s poems are “The Crusade” and “The Grave of King Arthur.”  The former is the song which

    “The lion heart Plantagenet
    Sang, looking through his prison-bars,”

when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king.  The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey.  The following passage anticipates Scott: 

    “Illumining the vaulted roof,
    A thousand torches flamed aloof;
    From many cups, with golden gleam,
    Sparkled the red metheglin’s stream: 
    To grace the gorgeous festival,
    Along the lofty-windowed hall
    The storied tapestry was hung;
    With minstrelsy the rafters rung
    Of harps that with reflected light
    From the proud gallery glittered bright: 
    While gifted bards, a rival