To illustrate Pope’s inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion, Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield.  He complains that Pope’s “Pastorals” contains no new image of nature, and his “Windsor Forest” no local color; while “the scenes of Thomson are frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with precipices and torrents and ‘castled cliffs’ and deep valleys, with piny mountains and the gloomiest caverns.”  “When Gray published his exquisite ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope’s ‘Pastorals.’”

A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic’s literary principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic.  Thus he pleads for the mot precis—­that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century romanticists—­for “natural, little circumstances” against “those who are fond of generalities”; for the “lively painting of Spenser and Shakspere,” as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in Voltaire’s “Henriade.”  He praises “the fashion that has lately obtained, in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope’s well-known triplet,

    “Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
    The varying verse, the full-resounding line,
    The long majestic march and energy divine!”

he exclaims:  “What!  Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and extent of our language?. . .  Surely his verses vary and resound as much, and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in Dryden.  And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that forms himself on French writers and their followers.”  Elsewhere he expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on subjects of a dignified kind.[16]

“It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect.  If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their fables, therefore the ‘Athalia,’ for instance, is preferable to ‘Lear,’ the notion is groundless and absurd.  Though the ‘Henriade’ should be allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to rank it with the ’Paradise Lost’?. . .  In our own country the rules of the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . .  Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated