Warton

Warton, JOSEPH, was born at Dunsfold, Surrey, in 1722, son of the Rev. Thomas Warton (1688–1745), vicar of Basingstoke in Hampshire, and sometime professor of Poetry at Oxford. At fourteen he was sent to Winchester, whence in 1740 he passed to Oriel College, Oxford. In 1748 he was presented to the rectory of Winslade near Basingstoke, was appointed second master of Winchester in 1755, and was its head-master from 1766 till his retirement in 1793. His prefelements were a prebend of St Paul's, the living of Thorley, Hertfordshire, a prebend of Winchester, and the rectory of Easton, which he soon after exchanged for that of Upham. His Odes (1746) marked a reaction against the dominant school of Pope. An edition of Virgil (1753), with translation of the Eclogues and Georgics, gained him a high reputation. He was much esteemed by Dr Johnson, and, like his brother Thomas, was one of the members of the famous Literary Club. In 1756 appeared the first volume of his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, the second and concluding volume following only in 1782. The distinction it drew between the poetry of reason and the poetry of fancy marked an important point in English criticism. His latest works were an annotated edition of Pope (9 vols. 1797) and a similar edition of Dryden, of which he had published two volumes at his death, in London, 23d February 1800. See the Memoir by the Rev. John Wooll, a ridiculously stilted panegyric (1806).—THOMAS WARTON, his brother, was born in 1728 at his father's vicarage of Basingstoke. In 1743 he was entered at Trinity College, Oxford, where he obtained a fellowship in 1751. He remained at the university as a tutor, and in 1757 was appointed professor of Poetry. In 1767 he took his B.D. degree, and was soon after presented to the living of Kiddington, to which he added in 1782 the college living of Hill Farrance in Somersetshire. But he had more taste for the pipe and tankard than clerical duty, and we are told how he mostly confined himself in preaching to two sermons—one his father's, the other a printed one, and even that abridged. His Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754; 2d ed. expanded to 2 vols. 1762) established his reputation as a critic. But the work by which Thomas Warton will be ever remembered is his History of English Poetry (1774–78–81; ed. in 4 vols. by W. C. Hazlitt, 1871), which, in the width of its learning, remains to this day unrivalled. As a poet Warton takes distinct if hardly high rank. In 1777 he published a collection, and on the death of Whitehead, the poet-laureate, he had the honour, such as it was, of succeeding him in the office. That same year he was elected Camden professor of History at Oxford. His last work was an elaborately annotated edition of the Minor Poems of Milton (1785). He died suddenly, 21st May 1790. His miscellaneous writings included humorous and burlesque poetry and prose, genial satires on Oxford, an edition of Theocritus, lives of Thomas Pope and Bathurst, two Trinity College benefactors, Inquiry into the authenticity of the Rowley Poems, &c. See the Life in Mant's edition of his poems (1802); and John Dennis, Studies in English Literature (1876).