Though sentimental literature bore the seeds of revolution, its earliest effect upon its devotees was to create, through flattery of human character, a feeling of good-natured complacency. Against this optimism the traditional school reacted in two ways,--derisive and hortatory. Pope, Young, and Swift satirized with masterful skill the inherent weaknesses and follies of mankind, the vigor of their strokes drawing from the sentimentalist Whitehead the feeble but significant protest, _On Ridicule_, deprecating satire as discouraging to benevolence. On the other hand, Wesley's hymns fervently summoned to repentance and piety; while Young's _Night Thoughts_, yielding to the new influence only in its form (blank verse), reasserted the hollowness of earthly existence, the justice of God's stern will, and the need of faith in heavenly immortality as the only adequate satisfaction of the spiritual elements in Man. The literary powers of Pope, Swift, and Young were far superior to those of the opposed school, which might have been overborne had not a second generation of sentimentalists arisen to voice its claims in a more poetical manner. These newcomers,--Akenside, J.G. Cooper, the Wartons, and Collins,--all of them very young, appeared between 1744 and 1747; and each rendered distinct service to their common cause. The least original of the group, John Gilbert Cooper, versified in _The Power of Harmony_ Shaftesbury's cosmogony. More independently, Mark Akenside developed out of the same doctrine of universal harmony the theory of aesthetics that was to guide the school,--the theory that the true poet is created not by culture and discipline at all, but owes to the impress of Nature--that beauty which is goodness--his imagination, his taste, and his moral vision. Though comparatively ardent and free in manner, Akenside pursued the customary, didactic method. Less abstract, more nearly an utterance of personal feeling, was Joseph Warton's _Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature_, historically a remarkable poem, which, through its expression of the author's tastes and preferences, indicated briefly some of the most important touchstones of the sentimentalism (_videlicet_, "romanticism") of the future. Warton found odious such things as artificial gardens, commercial interests, social and legal conventions, and a formal Addisonian style; he yearned for mountainous wilds, unspoiled savages, solitudes where the voice of Wisdom was heard above the storms, and poetry that was "wildly warbled." His younger brother Thomas, who wrote _The Pleasures of Melancholy_, and sonnets showing an interest in non-classical antiquities, likewise felt the need of new literary gods to sanction the practices of their school: Pope and Dryden were accordingly dethroned; Spenser, Shakespeare, and the young Milton, all of whom were believed to warble wildly, were invoked.