throng,
    From distant Mona, nurse of song,
    From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown,
    From Elvy’s vale and Cader’s crown,
    From many a shaggy precipice
    That shades Ierne’s hoarse abyss,
    And many a sunless solitude
    Of Radnor’s inmost mountains rude,
    To crown the banquet’s solemn close
    Themes of British glory chose.”

Here is much of Scott’s skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names, e.g.,

    “Day set on Norham’s castled steep,
    And Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep,
    And Cheviot’s mountains lone”—­

names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them.  Another passage in Warton’s poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson’s “Wild Tintagel by the Cornish sea” and his “island valley of Avilion.”

    “O’er Cornwall’s cliffs the tempest roared: 
    High the screaming sea-mew soared: 
    In Tintaggel’s topmost tower
    Darkness fell the sleety shower: 
    Round the rough castle shrilly sung
    The whirling blast, and wildly flung
    On each tall rampart’s thundering side
    The surges of the tumbling tide,
    When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks
    On conscious Camlan’s crimsoned banks: 
    By Mordred’s faithless guile decreed
    Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. 
    Yet in vain a Paynim foe
    Armed with fate the mightly blow;
    For when he fell, an elfin queen,
    All in secret and unseen,
    O’er the fainting hero threw
    Her mantle of ambrosial blue,
    And bade her spirits bear him far,
    In Merlin’s agate-axled car,
    To her green isle’s enameled steep
    Far in the navel of the deep.”

Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his favorite studies are the “Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on his Edition of the Faery Queene,” the “Monody Written near Stratford-upon-Avon,” the sonnets, “Written at Stonehenge,” “To Mr. Gray,” and “On King Arthur’s Round Table,” and the humorous epistle which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, denouncing the bishops for their recent order that fast-prayers should be printed in modern type instead of black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the author of “The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book” for his disrespectful remarks about antiquaries.

        “May’st thou pore in vain
    For dubious doorways!  May revengeful moths
    Thy ledgers eat!  May chronologic spouts
    Retain no cipher legible!  May crypts
    Lurk undiscovered!  Nor may’st thou spell the names
    Of saints in storied windows, nor the dates
    Of bells discover, nor the genuine site
    Of abbots’ pantries!”

Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the forerunners of the romantic school, was a trifle shame-faced over his Gothic heresies.  Sir Joshua Reynolds had supplied a painted window of classical design for New College, Oxford; and Warton, in some complimentary verses, professes that those “portraitures of Attic art” have won him back to the true taste;[9] and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, saints, miracles, martyrdoms, and tales of legendary lore shall—­