The History of English Poetry

Only three full volumes were ever published, going as far as Queen Elizabeth's reign, but their account of English poetry in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance was unrivalled for many years, and played a part in steering British literary taste towards Romanticism.

[5][6] The first volume, published in 1774 with a second edition the following year,[7] is prefaced with two dissertations: one on "The Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe", which he believed to lie in the Islamic world, and the other on "The Introduction of Learning into England", which deals with the revival of interest in Classical literature.

Warton decided to give no account of Anglo-Saxon poetry, ostensibly because it lay before "that era, when our national character began to dawn", though doubtless really because his knowledge of the language was too slight to serve him.

In 1824 a new and expanded edition of the History was published, with additional notes by, among others, Joseph Ritson, George Ashby, Francis Douce, Thomas Park, and the editor, Richard Price.

[17][18] By the time the dust had settled from this controversy everyone was aware that the History could not be implicitly trusted, but it continued to be loved by a new generation whose taste for the older English poetry Warton's book, along with Percy's Reliques, had formed.

The influence of those two books on the growth of the Romantic spirit can be illustrated by Robert Southey, who wrote that they had confirmed in him a love of Middle English that had been formed by his discovery of Chaucer; and by Walter Scott's description of the History as "an immense commonplace book…from the perusal of which we rise, our fancy delighted with beautiful imagery and with the happy analysis of ancient tale and song".

[19][20][4] In 1899 Sidney Lee wrote in the Dictionary of National Biography that: Even the mediæval expert of the present day, who finds that much of Warton's information is superannuated and that many of his generalisations have been disproved by later discoveries, realises that nowhere else has he at his command so well furnished an armoury of facts and dates about obscure writers.

Arthur Johnston wrote that To the modern scholar reading Warton, it is not his errors in transcripts or dating which attract attention; it is rather the richness of his information, the wealth of documentation, the multitude of his discoveries, his constant alertness to the problems and awareness of the ramifications of his subject.