by that timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models, from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared, succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass those . . . do not become stiff and forced.”  One of these uninteresting, though faultless tragedies was “Cato,” which Warton pronounces a “sententious and declamatory drama” filled with “pompous Roman sentiments,” but wanting action and pathos.  He censures the tameness of Addison’s “Letter from Italy."[17] “With what flatness and unfeelingness has he spoken of statuary and painting!  Raphael never received a more phlegmatic eulogy.”  He refers on the other hand to Gray’s account of his journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of the finest passages in the “Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard.”

This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against Wordsworth’s strictures in the preface to the “Lyrical Ballads.”  “The language of the age,” wrote Gray, “is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose.  Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or invention.  Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible.  In truth Shakspere’s language is one of his principal beauties; and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those other great excellencies you mention.  Every word in him is a picture.”  He then quotes a passage from “Richard III.,” and continues, “Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics.  To me they appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly degenerated.”

Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction of true taste in literature to the French.  “Shakspere and Milton imitated the Italians and not the French.”  He recommends also the reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry.  There are some, he says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational, deserting fairyland, and laying aside “descriptions of magic and enchantment,” and he quotes, a propos of this the famous stanza about the Hebrides