"Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers."
Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his facetiae in the "Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp" sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and castles built by the Normans; and the
"—bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne
With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone."
But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's poems are "The Crusade" and "The Grave of King Arthur." The former is the song which
"The lion heart Plantagenet
Sang, looking through his prison-bars,"
when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king. The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey. The following passage anticipates Scott:
"Illumining the vaulted roof,
A thousand torches flamed aloof;
From many cups, with golden gleam,
Sparkled the red metheglin's stream:
To grace the gorgeous festival,
Along the lofty-windowed hall
The storied tapestry was hung;
With minstrelsy the rafters rung
Of harps that with reflected light
From the proud gallery glittered bright:
While gifted bards, a rival throng,
From distant Mona, nurse of song,
From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown,
From Elvy's vale and Cader's crown,
From many a shaggy precipice
That shades Ierne's hoarse abyss,
And many a sunless solitude
Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude,
To crown the banquet's solemn close
Themes of British glory chose."
Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names, e.g.,
"Day set on Norham's castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone"—
names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them. Another passage in Warton's poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "Wild Tintagel by the Cornish sea" and his "island valley of Avilion."