Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
Writing in 1765 in the full swing ot the Enlightenment, an Oxford Don and Bachelor of Divinity Thomas Warton, began the Preface to his famous History of English Poetry (from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries) with the following lines:
In an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement that spceies of curiosity commences, which is busied in contemplating the progress of social life, in displaying the gradations of science, and in tracing the trinsitions from barbarism to civility
That these speculations should become the favourite pursuits and the fashonable topic of suth a period is extremly natural. We look back on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority.