At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his shortcomings, the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and reagency of the _Reliques_ is not now matter of dispute; while it is equally undeniable that the poetical material supplied was reinforced by a method of historical and critical inquiry which, again with all faults, could not fail to have effects almost equally momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous on creation. [Sidenote: _The Wartons._] The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assistance in this latter department, while Thomas Warton at least supplied a great deal of fresh actual material in his _History_. To none of the three has full justice, as it seems to me, been recently done; while to one of them it seems to me that there has been done very great injustice. The main documents which we have to consider in the case of the two brothers are for Joseph, his _Essay on Pope_ (1756-71), and the numerous critical papers in _The Adventurer_; for Thomas, the _Observations on The Faerie Queene_ (1754), and of course _The History of English Poetry_ (1774-81). [Sidenote: _Joseph’s_ Essay on Pope.] Warton’s _Essay on Pope_[117]—vaguely famous as a daring act of iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic Revolt— almost literally anticipates the jest of a hundred years later on another document, about “chalking up ‘No Popery!’ and then running away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-point which is quite pardonable and indeed inevitable in these early reformers. To us it is exceedingly unlucky that Warton should at page ii. of his Preface ask, “What traces has Donne of pure poetry?” Yet when we come immediately afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true statement that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère, we see that Warton was thinking only of the satirist, not of the author of _The Anniversaries_ and the “Bracelet” poems. Further, Warton lays down, _sans phrase_ and with no Addisonian limitations, that “a poet must have imagination.” He is sure (_we_ may feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his dedicatee, would not insist on being called a poet on the strength of his own Satires. And he works himself up to the position that in Pope there is nothing _transcendently_ sublime or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious and for its time instructive division of English poets into four classes. The first contains poets of the first rank on the sublime-pathetic-imaginative standard, and is limited to three—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company—headed by Dryden, but including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton—has less of this poetic intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical and didactic vigour. The third is reserved for those—Butler, Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.—who, with little poetry, have abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere versifiers, among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax herded with Pitt and Broome.