back to Bentley's reply to Boyle concerning the genuineness of the 

 so-called Letters of Phalaris. This is the forerunner of all antiquar- 

 ian and medieval researches contributory to the development of 

 historical method during the last one hundred and fifty years. 



On the poetic side we must go back at least as far as 1739. With 

 Thomson's poem, Edward and Leonora, in that year, and Joseph 

 Warton's Enthusiast, or The Love of Nature, 1740, the romantic 

 movement began to gather strength. Warton called for a return to 

 sincerity of observation and sanity of description. What may be 

 called the literary courage of the emotions received a beneficial 

 impetus from Dodsley's Collection of Old Plays, published in 1744, 

 and again in 1746, from Joseph Warton's Preface to Odes on Several 

 Subjects. Poetry was now fairly embarked on the romantic stream. 

 In criticism, too, the Wartons, Goldsmith, Young, .Gray, Collins, 

 Cowper, and Hurd are regarded by all as representatives of the 

 eighteenth century transition from the romanticism of Sidney and 

 Bacon to that of Wordsworth. But it must be remembered that not 

 only in these writers, but in Dryden and Dennis, as well, and differ- 

 ently in Addison, were present the germs of our present critical prin- 

 ciples and methods. Be that as it may, Kurd's Letters on Chivalry and 

 Romance, 1762, Blair's Critical Dissertation on Ossian, 1763, Thomas 

 Warton's History of English Poetry, 177481 (in which he acknow- 

 ledges the receipt of Gray's outline for the history), in 1781 the second 

 volume of Joseph Warton's Life and Genius of Pope, and in 1797 his 

 edition of that poet's works, these productions completed the 

 preliminaries of the attack upon the school of "correctness." In 1798 

 followed the brief and telling Preface to the first edition of the Lyrical 

 Ballads, and in 1800 the famous Preface to the second edition. In 

 the latter Wordsworth, save where he exploited untenable theories of 

 his own, succeeded in setting clearly before the world the strength 

 and the claims of the romantic return to imagination and nature; 

 a return that was to affect the principles and methods of poetics as 

 emphatically as it had already affected those of poetry. 



We must not fail to estimate the reconstructive influence exercised 

 meanwhile by the writers of treatises upon aesthetics. Of these the 

 first was Burke, whose Sublime and Beautiful, 1756, told not only 

 directly upon sesthetic speculation in England, but also indirectly 

 through the influence of Lessing and Kant, and their successors in 

 sesthetic criticism: the Schiller of the dUsthetische Brief e, and the 

 Goethe of the Sammler and the Deutsche Baukunst. For to Burke, 

 Lessing was indebted in the Laocoon, 1766, and Kant in the Kritik der 

 Urteilskraft, 1790. Other English sestheticians were Kaimes (Elements 

 of Criticism, 1762), Hogarth (Analysis of Beauty, 1753), Hume (Later 

 Dissertations, 1757), and Reynolds (Papers on the Idler, Discourses on 

 Beauty, 1758-59); and these likewise influenced Lessing, Kant, Schil- 



