signed the round-robin asking Johnson to rewrite in English his Latin epitaph on Goldsmith (Boswell, iii. 83). Johnson, on seeing Warton's signature, declared his wonder that 'Joe Warton, a scholar by profession, should be such a fool' (ib. p. 84 n.) But by humbler men of letters Warton's opinion was highly valued. Cowper was overwhelmed by his approbation. 'The poet,' he wrote, 'who pleases a man like that has nothing left to wish for.'
Some clerical preferment was conferred on Warton while he was still at Winchester. He was appointed by his friend Bishop Lowth prebendary of London in 1782, and Pitt, the prime minister, conferred on him a prebendal stall at Winchester in 1788. In 1783, too, Lowth presented him to the vicarage of Chorley, Hertfordshire, which he soon exchanged for that of Wickham, Hampshire, and in 1790 he was instituted to the rectory of Easton, which he at once exchanged for that of Upham, also in Hampshire. The livings of Upham and Wickham he held for life. To Wickham he retired on leaving Winchester in 1793. There he devoted himself anew to literature. He thought of completing the 'History of English Poetry' of his brother, whose death in 1790 greatly depressed him, but he occupied himself mainly with an edition of Pope's 'Works,' which appeared in 1797 in nine octavo volumes. Warton's remuneration amounted to 500l. (Nichols, Lit. Illustr. vii. 30). On the ground that he included two compositions of somewhat flagrant indecency—'the fourteenth chapter of Scriblerus' and the 'Second Satire of Horace'—Warton was castigated with unwarranted severity by Mathias in his 'Pursuits of Literature.' Subsequently he began an edition of the 'Works' of Dryden, which he did not live to finish. He died at Wickham on 23 Feb. 1800, and was buried beside his first wife in the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral. His former pupil, Richard Mant [q.v.], published a pamphlet of verses to his memory.
Warton married twice. In 1748 he married his first wife, Mary Daman of Winslade, who died on 5 Oct. 1772. Next year, in December, he married his second wife, Charlotte, second daughter of William Nicholas, who survived him and died in 1809. Warton had three sons and three daughters by his first wife. He had an only daughter, Harriot Elizabeth, by his second marriage (Bodleian Library MS. Wharton 13, ff. 15–19; Nichols, Lit. Illustr. i. 228–9). His sons—Joseph (b. 1750), Thomas (1754–1787), and John (b. 1756)—took holy orders.
A portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds is in the University Gallery in the Taylorian building at Oxford; a replica is at Winchester College. An engraving by R. Cardon was prepared for Wooll's 'Memoirs' (1806). A monument to Warton's memory by Flaxman was erected, at the expense of Old Wykehamists, in the south aisle of Winchester Cathedral.
Warton deserves remembrance as a learned and sagacious critic. He was a literary, not a philological, scholar. His verse, although it indicates a true appreciation of natural scenery, is artificial and constrained in expression. He was well equipped for the role of literary historian, but his great designs in that field never passed far beyond the stage of preliminary meditation. It was as a leader of the revolution which overtook literary criticism in England in the eighteenth century that his chief work was done. In the preface to his volume of odes of 1746 he made a firm stand against the prevailing tendency of English poetry. He was convinced, he wrote, 'that the fashion of moralising in verse had been carried too far.' The true 'faculties of the poet' were 'invention and imagination.' Warton's 'Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope' was doubtless suggested by resentment of Warburton's ponderous and polemical notes on Pope's philosophical views. Warton was more sensible than Warburton of the felicities of Pope's style, but his main object was to prove that 'correctness,' which had long been held to be the only test of poetry, was no test at all. The genuine spirit of poetry was to be found not in the moral essays of Pope and his didactic disciples, but in the less finished and less regular productions of writers of the temper of the Elizabethans and the Jacobeans. Spenser was, in his opinion, Pope's superior. From want of force of character, Warton never gained a first place among his contemporaries, but he claims the regard of students of literature for the new direction which he impressed on English poetical criticism (Pattison). Warton's edition of Pope, produced at the close of his life in 1797, supplies many notes that are superfluous, and almost all of them are needlessly verbose, but the book abounds in personal reminiscence and anecdote as well as in cultured and varied learning. Warton's edition has been superseded by that of Messrs. Elwin and Courthope, but in literary flavour it has not, in the opinion of so good a judge as Mark Pattison, been excelled. After his death some of his notes appeared in an edition of Dryden's poetical works, undertaken by his younger son, John (1811, 4 vols. 8vo). John Warton proposed to follow this by selections
