Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/442

 lected,’ London, 1791, 8vo. Another edition, edited, with a memoir, by Richard Mant, appeared at Oxford in 1802, 2 vols., and this was frequently reprinted in collected editions of the English poets. Warton on occasion showed full command of Pope's style and metre, but most of his verse is imitative of Milton and Spenser. Dr. Johnson contemptuously wrote of Warton's poetry that it consisted entirely of   Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy and sonnet. But, Johnson's scorn notwithstanding, Warton was an apt disciple of his sixteenth and seventeenth century masters, and as the reviver of the sonnet, which had been very rarely essayed in England since Milton, he was himself the master of many pupils who bettered his instruction. His sonnets treat side by side of the charms of antiquity and the charms of nature. A sonnet written on a flyleaf of Dugdale's ‘Monasticon’ is followed at a near interval by another on the ‘River Lodon.’ The versification was often uncouth, but Warton's sincere admiration for nature and antiquity alike, though not expressed in his sonnets or elsewhere with much subtlety, arrested attention in his own time by its novelty, and lent distinction to his poetic achievements. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb were appreciative readers of Warton. Christopher North said with much justice ‘the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet.’

North added that ‘Tom Warton was the finest fellow that ever breathed.’ In person he was, in middle life, unattractive, being, according to the most truthful observers, a fat little man, with a thick utterance resembling the gobble of a turkey-cock. With his love of scholarly study he combined somewhat slovenly habits and a taste for unrefined amusements. He delighted in the society of the Oxford watermen, and shocked the susceptibilities of his fellow-dons by often appearing in the Watermen's company on the river with a pipe in his mouth. He enjoyed drinking beer, especially in taverns, and, although he was the life and soul of his college common-room, was never quite at home in the intellectual salons of London. Miss Burney wrote of a meeting with him in 1783: ‘He looks unformed in his manners and awkward in his gestures. He joined not one word in the general talk’ (, Diary, ii. 237). When he visited his brother at Winchester College he is said to have indulged in all manner of boyish pranks with undignified amiability, and, owing to his bulk, with ludicrous awkwardness.

A fine portrait of Warton, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1784. There is a good mezzotint by Hodges. An engraving by Holl is prefixed to Mant's ‘Memoir,’ and another, by W. P. Sherlock, is published in Nichols's ‘Literary Illustrations’ (iv. 738).

In 1855 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Thomas Wright, and others, formed in Warton's honour a Warton Club for the publication of contributions to literary history, but the club was dissolved next year after issuing four volumes. Besides the works mentioned, Warton published ‘A Description of the City, College, and Cathedral of Winchester. Exhibiting a Complete and Comprehensive Detail of their Antiquities and Present State. The whole illustrated with several Curious and Authentic Particulars collected from a Manuscript of Anthony Wood, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; the College and Cathedral Registers, and other Original Authorities, never before published,’ London, n.d. [1750], 12mo. Some of Warton's notes were utilised in the well-illustrated volumes called ‘Essays on Gothic Architecture, by the Rev. T. Warton, Rev. J. Bentham, Captain Grose, and the Rev. J. Milner,’ London, 1800, 8vo. An unpublished manuscript by Warton, entitled ‘Observations, Critical and Historical, on Churches, Monasteries, Castles, and other Monuments of Antiquity in various Counties of England and Wales,’ supplies records of his vacation tours between 1759 and 1773. The manuscript is now the property of Miss M. S. Lee of Church Manor, Bishop's Stortford, and was described by Henry Boyle Lee in the ‘Cornhill Magazine’ for June 1865 (pp. 733 sqq.).

[Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, and Lit. Illustrations; Memoir, by Richard Mant, prefixed to the collected edition of Warton's Poems, 1802; Nathan Drake's Essays, 1810, ii. 166–219; Horace Walpole's Corresp. ed. Cunningham; Dennis's Studies in English Literature; Boswell's Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill; Austin and Ralph's Lives of the Poet-Laureates, pp. 316–32; Cornhill Mag. June 1865; Blakiston's History of Trinity College, Oxford, 1898, pp. 193 sq.; E. R. Wharton's manuscript history of Wharton and Warton families in Bodleian Library.] 

WARWICK,. [See, 1425-1445.]

WARWICK,. [See, d. 1123; or, d. 1263; ,