Part 10
In 1758, he made a selection of Latin inscriptions in verse; and printed it, together with notes, under the title of Inscriptionum Romanarum Metricarum Delectus; and then first undertook, at the suggestion it is said of Judge Blackstone, the splendid edition of Theocritus, which made its appearance twelve years after. The papers left by Mr. St. Amand,[1] formed the basis of this work: to them were added some valuable criticisms by Toup; and though the arrangement of the whole may be justly charged with a want of clearness and order, and Dr. Gaisford has since employed much greater exactness and diligence in his edition of the same author, yet the praise of a most entertaining and delightful variety cannot be denied to the notes of Warton. In a dissertation on the Bucolic poetry of the Greeks, he shews that species of composition to have been derived from the ancient comedy; and exposes the dream of a golden age.
La bella eta dell' or unqua non venne, Nacque da nostre menti Entro il vago pensiero, E nel nostro desio chiaro divenne. _Guidi_.
The characters in Theocritus, are shewn to be distinguished into three classes,--herdsmen, shepherds, and goatherds; the first of which was superior to the next, as that in its turn was to the third; and this distinction is proved to have been accurately observed, as to allusions and images. The discrimination seems to have been overlooked by Virgil: in which instance, no less than in all the genuine graces of pastoral poetry, he is inferior to the Sicilian.[2] The contempt with which Warton speaks of those eminent and unfortunate Greek scholars, who diffused the learning of their country over Europe, after the capture of Constantinople, and whom he has here termed "Graeculi famelici," is surely reprehensible. But for their labours, Britain might never have required an editor of Theocritus.
In 1760, he contributed to the Biographia Britannica a Life of Sir Thomas Pope, twice, subsequently published, in a separate form, with considerable enlargements: in the two following years he wrote a Life of Dr. Bathurst, and in his capacity of Poetry Professor, composed Verses on the Death of George II., the Marriage of his Successor, and the Birth of the Heir Apparent, which, together with his Complaint of Cherwell, made a part of the Oxford Collections. Several of his humorous pieces were soon after (in 1764) published in the Oxford Sausage, the preface to which he also wrote; and in 1766, he edited the Greek Anthology of Cephalas. In 1767, he took the degree of Bachelor in Divinity; and in 1771, was chosen a Fellow of the Antiquarian Society; and on the nomination of the Earl of Lichfield, Chancellor of the University, was collated to the Rectory of Kiddington, Oxfordshire, a benefice of small value. Ten years after, he drew up a History of his Parish, and published it as a specimen of a Parochial History of Oxfordshire. Meanwhile, he was engaged in an undertaking, of higher interest to the national antiquities and literature.
In illustrating the origin, and tracing the progress of our vernacular poetry, we had not kept pace with the industry of our continental neighbours. To supply this deficiency, a work had been projected by Pope, and was now contemplated, and indeed entered on, by Gray and Mason, in conjunction. We cannot but regret, that Gray relinquished the undertaking, as he did, on hearing into whose hands it had fallen, since he would (as the late publication of his papers by Mr. Mathias has shewn) have brought to the task a more accurate and extensive acquaintance with those foreign sources from whence our early writers derived much of their learning, and would, probably, have adopted a better method, and more precision in the general disposition of his materials. Yet there is no reason to complain of the way in which Warton has acquitted himself, as far as he has gone. His History of English Poetry is a rich mine, in which, if we have some trouble in separating the ore from the dross, there is much precious metal to reward our pains. The first volume of this laborious work was published in 1774; two others followed, in 1778, and in 1781; and some progress had been made at his decease in printing the fourth. In 1777, he increased the poetical treasure of his country by a volume of his own poems, of which there was a demand for three other editions before his death. In 1782, we find him presented by his college to the donative of Hill Farrance, in Somersetshire, and employed in publishing an Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, and Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds's painted window at New College: about the same time, probably, he was chosen a member of the Literary Club.
In 1785, he edited Milton's minor poems, with very copious illustrations; and in the year following, was elected to the Camden Professorship of History, and was appointed to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. In his inaugural speech as Camden Professor, subjoined to the edition of his poetical works by Dr. Mant, he has shewn that the public duties required at the first foundation of the Professorship, owing to the improvement in the course of academical studies, are rendered no longer necessary. From one who had already voluntarily done so much, it would have been ungracious to exact the performance of public labours not indispensably requisite. In the discharge of his function as Laureate, he still continued, as he had long ago professed himself to be,--
Too free in servile courtly phrase to fawn;
and had the wish been gratified,--expressed by himself before his appointment, or by Gibbon after it,--that the annual tribute might be dispensed with, we should have lost some of his best lyric effusions.
Till his sixty-second year, he had experienced no interruption to a vigorous state of health. Then a seizure of the gout compelled him to seek relief from the use of the Bath waters; and he returned from that place to college, with the hope of a recovery from his complaint. But on the 20th of May, 1790, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, as he was sitting in the common room with two of the college fellows, and in higher spirits than usual, a paralytic affection deprived him of his speech. Some indistinct sounds only, in which it was thought the name of his friend, Mr. Price, the librarian of the Bodleian, was heard, escaped him, and he expired on the day but one after. His funeral was honoured by the attendance of the Vice-Chancellor, and a numerous train of followers, to the ante-chapel of his college, where he is interred, with a very plain inscription to his memory.
His person was short and thick, though in the earlier part of his life he had been thought handsome. His face, latterly, became somewhat rubicund, and his utterance so confused, that Johnson compared it to the gobbling of a turkey. The portrait of him by Reynolds, besides the resemblance of the features, is particularly characterized by the manner in which the hand is drawn, so as to give it a great air of truth. He was negligent in his dress; and so little studious of appearances, that having despatched his labours, while others were yet in bed, he might have been found, at the usual hours of study, loitering on the banks of his beloved Cherwell, or in the streets, following the drum and fife, a sound which was known to have irresistible attraction for his ears,--a spectator at a military parade, or even one amongst a crowd at a public execution. He retained to old age the amiable simplicity and unsuspecting frankness of boyhood: his affection for his brother, to whose society at Winchester he latterly retired from college, during the vacations in summer, does not seem ever to have suffered any abatement; and his manners were tranquil and unassuming. The same amenity and candour of disposition, which marked him in private life, pervade his writings, except on some few occasions, when his mind is too much under the influence of party feelings. This bias inclined him, not only to treat the character of Milton with a most undue asperity, but even to extenuate the atrocities committed under the government of Mary, and somewhat to depreciate the worth of those divines, whose attachment to the reformed religion led them to suffer death in her reign.
The writer of this paper has been told by an Italian, who was acquainted with Warton, that his favourite book in the Italian language (of which his knowledge was far from exact) was the Gerusalemme Liberata. Both the stately phrase, and the theme of that poem, were well suited to him.
Among the poets of the second class, he deserves a distinguished place. He is almost equally pleasing in his gayer, and in his more exalted moods. His mirth is without malice or indecency, and his seriousness without gloom.
In his lyrical pieces, if we seek in vain for the variety and music of Dryden, the tender and moral sublime of Gray, or the enthusiasm of Collins, yet we recognize an attention ever awake to the appearances of nature, and a mind stored with the images of classical and Gothic antiquity. Though his diction is rugged, it is like the cup in Pindar, which Telamon stretches out to Alcides, [Greek: chruso pephrkuan], rough with gold, and embost with curious imagery. A lover of the ancients would, perhaps, be offended, if the birth-day ode, beginning
Within what fountain's craggy cell Delights the goddess Health to dwell?
were compared, as to its subject, with that of the Theban bard, on the illness of Hiero, which opens with a wish that Chiron were yet living, in order that the poet might consult him on the case of the Syracusan monarch; and in its form, with that in which he asks of his native city, in whom of all her heroes she most delighted.
Among the odes, some of which might more properly be termed idylliums, The Hamlet is of uncommon beauty; the landscape is truly English, and has the truth and tenderness of Gainsborough's pencil. Those To a Friend on his leaving a Village in Hampshire, and the First of April, are entitled to similar praise. The Crusade, The Grave of King Arthur, and most of the odes composed for the court, are in a higher strain. In the Ode written at Vale Royal Abbey, is a striking image, borrowed from some lent verses, written by Archbishop Markham, and printed in the second volume of that collection.
High o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen, No more the windows ranged in long array (Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between Thick ivy twines) the taper'd rites betray.
_Prodidit areanas arcta fenestra faces_.
His sonnets have been highly and deservedly commended by no less competent a judge than Mr. Coleridge. They are alone sufficient to prove (if any proof were wanting) that this form of composition is not unsuited to our language. One of our longest, as it is one of our most beautiful poems, the Faerie Queene, is written in a stanza which demands the continual recurrence of an equal number of rhymes; and the chief objection to our adopting the sonnet is the paucity of our rhymes.
The lines to Sir Joshua Reynolds are marked by the happy turn of the compliment, and by the strength and harmony of the versification, at least as far as the formal couplet measure will admit of those qualities. They need not fear a comparison with the verses addressed by Dryden to Kneller, or by Pope to Jervas.
His Latin compositions are nearly as excellent as his English. The few hendecasyllables he has left, have more of the vigour of Catullus than those by Flaminio; but Flaminio excels him in delicacy. The Mons Catharinae contains nearly the same images as Gray's Ode on a Prospect of Eton College. In the word "cedrinae," which occurs in the verses on Trinity College Chapel, he has, we believe, erroneously made the penultimate long. Dr. Mant has observed another mistake in his use of the word "Tempe" as a feminine noun, in the lines translated from Akenside. When in his sports with his brother's scholars at Winchester he made their exercises for them, he used to ask the boy how many faults he would have:--one such would have been sufficient for a lad near the head of the school.
His style in prose, though marked by a character of magnificence, is at times stiff and encumbered. He is too fond of alliteration in prose as well as in verse; and the cadence of his sentences is too evidently laboured.
FOOTNOTES [1] There is a little memoir of James St. Amand, in the preface, that will interest some readers. He was of Lincoln College, Oxford, about 1705, where he had scarcely remained a year, before his ardour for Greek literature induced him to visit Italy, chiefly with a view of searching MSS. that might serve for an edition of Theocritus. In Italy, before he had reached his twentieth year, he was well known to the learned world, and had engaged the esteem of many eminent men; among others, of Vincenzo Gravina, Niccolo Valletto, Fontanini, Quirino, Anton Maria Salvini, and Henry Newton, the English Ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany. Their letters to him are preserved in the Bodleian. By his researches into the MSS. of Italian libraries, he assisted his learned friends, Kuster, Le Clerc, Potter, Hudson, and Kennet, and other literary characters of that time, in their several pursuits. He then returned to England by way of Geneva and Paris, well laden with treasures derived from the foreign libraries, all which, with a large collection of valuable books, he bequeathed to the Bodleian. He died about 1750. He desisted from his intention of publishing Theocritus, either from ill health, or weariness of his work, or some fear about its success. His preparations for this edition, together with some notes on Pindar (an edition of which he also meditated), Aristophanes, the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, Demosthenes, and others, remain in the Bodleian. Dr. Shaw, in his edition of Apollonius Rhodius, has since made use of his notes on that poet, and pays a tribute to his critical abilities in the preface. [2] Warton's distinction between them is well imagined. "Sinillis est Theocritus amplo cuidam pascuo per se satis foecundo, herbis pluribus frugiferis floribusque pulchris abundanti, dulcibus etiam fluviis uvido: similis Virgilius horto distincto nitentibus areolis; ubi larga floruni copia, sed qui studiose dispositi, curaque meliore nutriti, atque exculti diligenter, olim hue a pascuo illo majore transferebantur."
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JOSEPH WARTON.
The Memoirs of Joseph Warton, by Dr. Wooll, the present Head-master of Rugby school, is a book which, although it contains a faithful representation of his life and character by one who had been his pupil, and though it is enriched with a collection of letters between some of the men most distinguished in literature during his time, is yet so much less known than it deserves, that in speaking of it to Mr. Hayley, who had been intimate with Warton, and to whom some of the letters are addressed, I found him ignorant of its contents. It will supply me with much of what I have to relate concerning the subject of it.
There is no instance in this country of two brothers having been equally celebrated for their skill in poetry with Joseph and Thomas Warton. What has been already told of the parentage of the one renders it unnecessary to say more in this respect of the other. He was born at Dunsfold, in Surrey, under the roof of his maternal grandfather, in the beginning of 1722. Like his brother, he experienced the care of an affectionate parent, who did the utmost his scanty means would allow to educate them both as scholars; but with this difference, that Joseph being three-and -twenty years old at the time of Mr. Warton's decease, whereas Thomas was but seventeen, was more capable of appreciating, as it deserved, the tenderness of such a father. To what has been before said of this estimable man, I have to add, that his poems, of which I had once a cursory view, appeared to me to merit more notice than they have obtained; and that his version of Fracastorio's pathetic lamentation on the death of his two sons particularly engaged my attention. Suavis adeo poeta ac doctus, is the testimony borne to him by one[1] who will himself have higher claims of the same kind on posterity.
Having been some time at New College school, but principally taught by his father till he was fourteen years old, Joseph was then admitted on the foundation of Winchester, under Dr. Sandby. Here, together with two of his school-fellows, of whom Collins was one, he became a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson, who then assisted in editing that miscellany, had sagacity enough to distinguish, from the rest, a few lines that were sent by Collins, which, though not remarkable for excellence, ought now to take their place among his other poems.
In 1740, Warton being superannuated at Winchester, was entered of Oriel College, Oxford; and taking his bachelor's degree, in 1744, was ordained to his father's curacy at Basingstoke. Having lost his father about a year after, he removed to the curacy of Chelsea, in February, 1746. Near this time, I suppose a letter, that is without date of time or place, to have been written to his brother. As it informs us of some particulars relating to Collins, of whom it is to be wished that more were known, I am tempted to transcribe it.
Dear Tom,--You will wonder to see my name in an advertisement next week, so I thought I would apprize you of it. The case was this. Collins met me in Surrey, at Guildford races, when I wrote out for him my Odes, and he likewise communicated some of his to me: and being both in very high spirits, we took courage, resolved to join our forces, and to publish them immediately. I flatter myself, that I shall lose no honour by this publication, because I believe these Odes, as they now stand, are infinitely the best things I ever wrote. You will see a very pretty one of Collins's, on the Death of Colonel Ross before Tournay. It is addressed to a lady who was Ross's intimate acquaintance, and who, by the way, is Miss Bett Goddard. Collins is not to publish the Odes unless he gets ten guineas for them.
I returned from Milford last night, where I left Collins with my mother and sister, and he sets out to-day for London. I must now tell you, that I have sent him your imitation of Horace's Blandusian Fountain, to be printed amongst ours, and which you shall own or not as you think proper. I would not have done this without your consent, but because I think it very poetically and correctly done, and will get you honour.
* * * * *
You will let me know what the Oxford critics say. Adieu, dear Tom.
I am your most affectionate brother,
J. WARTON.
On this Dr. Wooll founds a conjecture, that Warton published a volume of poems conjointly with his brother and Collins; but adds, that after a diligent search he had not been able to discover it. I think it more likely that the design was abandoned. However this may be, it is certain that he himself published a volume of Odes in 1746, of which, as I learn from a note to the present Bishop of Killaloe's verses to his memory, a second edition appeared in the following year. To complete his recovery from the small-pox, which he had taken at Chelsea, he went, in May 1746, to Chobham; and then, after officiating for a few months at Chawton and Droxford, returned to his first curacy of Basingstoke. In the next year he was presented by the Duke of Bolton to the rectory of Wynslade, by which preferment he was enabled immediately to marry a young lady in that neighbourhood, of the name of Daman, to whom he had been long attached. Of the country adjacent to Wynslade, Thomas Warton has given a very pleasing description in one of his sonnets, and in an "Ode sent to a friend, on his leaving a favourite village in Hampshire." Both were written on the occasion of his brother's absence, who had gone in the train of the Duke of Bolton to France. One motive, on which he went, would not now be thought quite creditable to a clergyman. It was that he might be at hand to join the Duke in marriage to his mistress, as soon as the Duchess, who was far gone in a dropsy, should be no more. Warton set out reluctantly, but with the hope that he might benefit his family by compliance. He had not been away five months, when the impatience for home came on him so strongly, that he quitted Montauban, where the Duke was residing, and made his way towards England by such conveyances as he could meet with; at one time in a courier's cart; at another, in the company of carriers who were travelling in Britanny. Thus he scrambled on to Bourdeaux, and till he reached St. Malo's, where he took ship and landed at Southampton. When he had been returned a month the Duchess died. He then asked permission to go back, and perform the marriage ceremony; but the chaplain of the embassy at Turin was already on his way for that purpose.
He was now once more at Wynslade, restored to a domestic life, and the uninterrupted pursuit of his studies. Before going abroad, he had published (in 1749) his Ode on West's translation of Pindar; and after his return, employed himself in writing papers, chiefly on subjects of criticism, for the Adventurer, and in preparing for the press an edition of Virgil, which (in 1753) he published, together with Pitt's translation of the Aeneid, his own of the Eclogues and Georgies, his notes on the whole, and several essays. The book has been found useful for schools; and was thought at the time to do him so much credit, that it obtained for him the degree of Master of Arts by diploma from the University of Oxford, and no doubt was instrumental in recommending him to the place of second master of Winchester School, to which he was appointed in 1755. In the meantime he had been presented by the Jervoise family to the rectory of Tunworth, and resided for a short time at that place.