A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



sat in a headmaster's chair. The son and brother of a professor of poetry 

 at Oxford, the brother, Tom Warton, succeeding Whitehead as poet 

 laureate, Joseph Warton himself ' lisped in numbers, for the numbers 

 came.' If he had not preferred the more lucrative career of teaching he 

 might have been a greater poet than any of the school. His earliest 

 effort, ' Sappho's advice,' was published by him in the Gentleman's 

 Magazine, above the signature Monitorius, when he was a prefect at 

 Winchester, together with a shorter poem by Tomkyns, and a sonnet by 

 Collins. 



He edited Virgil in Latin and English with eclat in 1753. This 

 largely, no doubt, procured his appointment as second master at Win- 

 chester in 1755. We are told that 



Dr. Burton had long been inclined to resign his situation, could he have secured 

 it to Mr. Speed. But parties ran high in the Wykehamical society. Speed was a 

 Whig . . . Dr. Burton, unable to carry his point, remained. Mr. Speed retired and 

 was succeeded by Dr. Warton. 



Next year, in spite of his boarding-house and school work, he pub- 

 lished his Essay on Pope, dedicated to the author of the Night Thoughts, 

 Edward Young, himself a Wykehamist of an earlier date (college, 1694). 

 In 1766, on Burton's too-long-delayed retirement, Warton became head- 

 master. He had to meet from Pope much the same objection as has 

 been levelled against public school, or rather classical, education many 

 times since, that it consisted of ' words alone.' His defence is an 

 anticipation of much recent argument : 



To read, to interpret, to translate the best poets, orators, and historians of the 

 best ages, that is, those authors that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of 

 moral truth, most examples of virtue and integrity, most materials for conversation, 

 cannot be called confining youths to words alone, and keeping them out of the way of 

 real knowledge ; and as to plying the memory and loading the brain, it was the 

 opinion of Milton, and is a practice in our great seminaries, ' that if passages from the 

 heroic poems, orations, and tragedies of the ancients were solemnly pronounced, with 

 right action and grace, they would endue the scholars even with the spirit and vigour 

 of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides or Sophocles.' 



It may be remembered that in our own day Matthew Arnold wished 

 the same system adopted, and succeeded to a large extent in getting it 

 adopted, in public elementary schools. 



Wooll writes of Warton 's headmastership : 



The fame of the school under such auspices could not be otherwise than great. 

 Whilst a far larger number of commoners than had been known at any former period 

 filled the boarding-houses at Winchester, the university honours, particularly those pro- 

 cured by poetical efforts, were successfully borne away by members of New College. 



Nor is this the opinion only of an insider. A writer in the 

 Gentleman's Magazine in 1775, expostulating with Lord North, then 

 chancellor of the university, against the Wykehamist monopoly of 

 university distinction, asked : ' Is genius confined within the walls of a 

 single college ? Or have Wykehamists effectually kept Minerva among 

 themselves by those iron rails, with which they have surrounded the 

 present image of her ? ' (now disappeared) . 



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