"A faithless truant to the classic page, Long have I loved to catch the simple chime Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme," and again he says:-- "I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age," that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore." After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge. His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke of with respect. He warmly recommends the _Morte d'Arthur_, which had probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that epic poetry--and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser--would never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had been in vogue.