...Warton fastens a sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold by saying: " But it ia absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to." Absurd, indeed! But what becomes of those antecedent laws of poetry, those rules of the kind and so...

...to a priori rules of criticism, often used recent works in comparisons, and daringly maintained that "It is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or...Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to". More important was his "History of English Poetry", published 1774-1781. This book had ils defects,...

..."produced a revolution in criticism." 6 No doubt there is the possibility of a revolution in his remark, " It is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or...Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to," but unfortunately this utterance is not original and by no means represents his critical position....

...he now uses the argument, already put forward by Hughes and the Italian defenders of Ariosto, that it is 'absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or...Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to'. Today 'critical taste is universally diffused, and we require the same order and design which every...

...modern eyes'; and he drew out the idea at greater length in 1761 in berating how absurd it would be *to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to'. 61 The aberration that Warton thought his contemporaries ('We who live in the days of writing by rule')...

...the discovery of the historical method are those of the well-known sentence from the Observations: "It is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or...Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to. " (It may be worthy of notice that neither Warton nor his critic raises the question whether they should...