[Sidenote: _Thomas Warton on Spenser._] For a combination of earliness, extension, and character no book noticed in this chapter exceeds in interest Thomas Warton’s _Observations on Spenser_.[119] To an ordinary reader, who has heard that Warton was one of the great ushers of Romanticism in England, and that Spenser was one of the greatest influences which these ushers applied, the opening of the piece, and not a very few passages later, may seem curiously half-hearted and unsympathetic. Such a reader, from another though closely connected point of view, may be disappointed by the fragmentary and _annotatory_ character of the book, its deficiency in _vues d’ensemble_, its apologies, and compromises, and hesitations. But those who have taken a little trouble to inform themselves on the matter, either by their own inquiries or by following the course which has been indicated in this book, will be much better satisfied. They will see that he says what he ought to have said in the concatenation accordingly. It is impossible to decide how much of yet not discarded orthodoxy, and how much of characteristic eighteenth-century compromise there is in the opening about “depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity,” “ridiculous and incoherent excursions,” “old _Provençal_ vein,” and the like. Probably there is a good deal of both;[120] there is certainly a good deal which requires both to excuse it. Yet before long Warton fastens a sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold by saying: “But it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to.” Absurd, indeed! But what becomes of those antecedent laws of poetry, those rules of the kind and so forth, which for more than two hundred years had been accumulating authority? It is no good for him to go on: “We who live in the days of writing by rule.... Critical taste is universally diffused ...” and so on. The petard goes on fizzing and sparkling at the gate, and will blow it in before long.