He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself with creative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact that here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "The Enthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Warton that it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have come under the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love and idleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not to write anything characteristic until ten years later. But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurred to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from Joseph Warton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the same relation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a young poet to-day; the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ dates from 1724, and Allan Ramsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us. But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, they were accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These we find for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the old formulas and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws of poetical practice is his solicitude for the sensations of the individual. These had been reduced to silence by the neo-classic school in its determination to insist on broad Palladian effects of light and line. The didactic and moral aim of the poets had broken the springs of lyrical expression, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of a romantic spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, by reticence and vagueness.