WARTHE (

See also:

• POLISH

Polish, Warta)  , a river of Poland and Germany, and the chief affluent of the Oder . It rises on the north slope of the Carpathian Mountains N.W. of Cracow, flows north as far as Radomsk, then west, then north again past Sieradz, until it reaches Kola, where it again turns west, crosses the frontier into the Prussian province of Posen, where it takes a northerly direction past the town of Posen .. Then once more bending west, it flows past Schwerin and Landsberg and enters the Oder from the right at Cifstrin . Its total length is 445 M. of which 215 are in Poland and 230 in Prussia; it is navigable up to Konin in West Poland, a distance of 265 M . Its. banks are mostly low and flat, its lower course especially running through drained and cultivated marshes . It is connected with the Vistula through its tributary the Netze and the Bromberg canal . The area of its or The Lover of Nature, and remember that it was printed in 1744, the year of Pope's death . " As he is convinced," he wrote in the preface (1746) to his Odes on Several Subjects, " that the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet, so he will be happy if the following odes may be looked upon as an attempt to bring back poetry into its right channel." He published an edition (1753) in Latin and English of Virgil . This contained Christopher Pitt's version of the Acneid, his own rendering of the Eclogues and Georgics in the heroic measure, and essays by Warburton and others . Warton himself appended essays on epic and didactic poetry, a life of Virgil and notes . He made the acquaintance of Dr Johnson, and wrote papers on Shakespeare and Homer in The Adventurer; and in 1757 he published the first part of an Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an essay regarded at the time as revolutionary, by Johnson at least, because it put Pope in the second rank to Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton, on the ground that moral and ethical poetry, however excellent, is an inferior species . He held his own against Johnson in the Literary Club; and after enduring many jests about the promised second part of the essay and the delay in its appearance, published it at last, retracting nothing, in 1782 .

Warton's edition of Pope was published in 1797 . An edition of

Dryden, for which he had collected materials, was completed and published by his son in 1811 . Warton was a prebendary of St Paul's and of Winchester Cathedrals, and held the livings of Upham and of Wickham, Hampshire, where he died on the 23rd of February 18co . See Biographical Memoirs of the Late Rev . Joseph Warton, by John Wooll (vol. i., 18o6, no more published) .