Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly or incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics of less importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen so strongly as in Joseph Warton’s audacious question whether Pope, the god of the idolatry of the earlier part of the century in England, was a poet, or at least a great poet, at all; in Lessing’s proposition to call the great Corneille, just re-habilitated as he had been by Voltaire himself, Corneille the Monstrous. These things indeed were, like all revolutionary manifestos, extravagances, yet the extravagance was not only symptomatic but to a great extent healthy. It was probably impossible as a matter of tactics—it would certainly have been unnatural as a matter of history and human nature—to refrain from carrying the war into the enemies’ country, from laying siege to the enemies’ stronghold. And this was invited by the ignorant and insulting depreciation which had long been, and long continued to be, thrown upon one of the most charming and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the world. But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as independent of Classical Unity, which is one of the most important discoveries or at least pronouncements of any time, which practically established a _modus vivendi_ between all rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic criticism, and which has never yet been worked out as it deserves. Percy’s _Essay on Alliterative Metre_, despite the comparative narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and falls in interestingly with that more intelligent devotion to Prosody which has up to the present time given better results than any “metacritic,” and has plenty yet to give. Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and sometimes an insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and sound. Diderot might with advantage have concentrated that “encyclopædic head” of his on fewer subjects, have been less anarchic, more subject to harmless convention. But there are few better examples in literature of the “strong young devil shut up in an iron box” and made to do work—as the Bulgarian peasant defined the locomotive to an English engineer who went to the Balkans after the war of 1878. We have not feared to speak of Lessing’s shortcomings, but though it is possible to speak indiscreetly and unadvisedly of his merits in kind and point, who shall overpraise them in degree? And the bent of almost all of them turned, and turned most beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to History.