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.

William Collins was the most gifted of this band of enthusiasts.  His general views were theirs:  poetry is in his mind associated with wonder and ecstacy; and it finds its true themes, as the Ode on Popular Superstitions shows, in the weird legends, the pathetic mischances, and the blameless manners of a simple-minded folk remote from cities.  Unlike his fellows, Collins had moments of great lyric power, and gave posterity a few treasured poems.  His further distinction is that he desired really to create that poetical world about which Akenside theorized and for which the Wartons yearned.  Unhappily, however, he too often peopled it with allegorical figures who move in a hazy atmosphere; and his melody is then more apparent than his meaning.

The hopeful spirit of these enthusiasts found little encouragement in the poems with which the period closed,—­Gray’s Ode on Eton and Hymn to Adversity, and Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes.

  Some bold adventurers disdain
  The limits of their little reign,

wrote Gray, adding with the wisdom of disillusion,

  Gay hopes are theirs, by fancy fed,
  Less pleasing when possessed.

He was speaking of schoolboys whose ignorance is bliss; but the general tenor of his mind allows us to surmise that he also smiled pityingly upon some of the aspirations of the youthful sentimentalists.  Dr. Johnson’s hostility to them was, of course, outspoken.  He laughed uproariously at their ecstatic manner, and ridiculed the cant of sensibility; and in solemn mood he struck in The Vanity of Human Wishes another blow at the heresy of optimism.  In style the contrast between these poems and those of the Wartons and Collins is marked.  Heirs of the Augustans, Johnson and Gray have perfect control over their respective diction and metres:  here are no obscurities or false notes; Johnson sustains with superb dignity the tone of moral grandeur; Gray is ever felicitous.  Up to the mid-century then, despite assailants, the classical school held its supremacy; for its literary art was incomparably more skillful than that of its enemies.