[117]. Vol. i. appeared in 1756, vol. ii. not till 1782—which gap of a quarter of a century is not imperceptible in the work itself, and must be remembered in reading the text.
[118]. On this, as on other points in this chapter and chap. v., and on chapter i. of the last Book of the last volume generally, a most valuable companion has been supplied since my text was written by Mr D. Nichol Smith’s excellent edition of Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare. (Glasgow, 1903.)
[119]. The full title is Observations on the Faërie Queene of Spenser ed. 1 (London, 1754); ed. 2, 1762 (of which is my copy). From Hughes’s editions of 1715 to Upton’s of 1758 (after Warton’s first edition) a good deal of attention had been paid to Spenser, if not quite according to knowledge. For a long list of imitations in the eighteenth century see Mr H. A. Beers (English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1899, pp. 854-55, note), who copies it from Prof. Phelps.
[120]. i. 15, ed. cit.
[121]. Ed. cit., i. 96.
[122]. Originally issued in the years 1774-78-81. The editions of 1824 and 1840, with additional notes by Price and others, are valuable for matter; and that of Mr W. C. Hazlitt (4 vols., London, 1871), with the assistance of Drs Furnival, Morris, Skeat, and others, invaluable. But Warton’s own part is necessarily more and more obscured in them.
[123]. De quo fabula?
[124]. See [Appendix I].
[125]. He is, however, exquisitely characteristic in his description of Addison’s own critical work (see the Bohn ed., ii. 383) as “discovering his own good taste, and calculated to improve that of the reader, but otherwise of no great merit.”
[126]. e.g. iii. 171: “Men’s minds. Men’s, for the genitive plural of man, is not allowable.”