Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and no other part of the _Observations_ is so valuable as the pages in which those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently fantastic in the plot of the _Orlando Furioso_. On that point he says, "The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no chivalry in _The Schoolmistress_, that accomplished piece was the indirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson were presently received. The earliest specimens of _Ossian_ were revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters," the laugh was really at the expense of his school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed his boyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior. Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, though he held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to the brothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival," and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:-- "Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy and sonnet."