Then come The Mirror for Magistrates, Thomas Sackville, Richard Edwardes, and finally a general survey of Elizabethan poetry. He moves on to the Earl of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt, Tottel's Miscellany, John Heywood, Thomas More, and another out-of-sequence study, this time of the Middle English romance of Ywain and Gawain.
The third volume, published in 1781, begins with a dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum, one of many sections of the History to fall out of chronological sequence. The volume ends with chapters on the mystery plays, and on continental humanism and the Reformation. He studies the Scottish Chaucerians in some detail, then returns to England and John Skelton. It deals with John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and the controversy over the authenticity of Thomas Rowley's poems (actually forgeries by Thomas Chatterton, as Warton shows), before moving on to Stephen Hawes and other poets of the reigns of Henry VII. The volume ends with a long and detailed look at the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
A CRITICAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE SERIES
Then follow a series of studies of various Middle English romances, of Piers Plowman, and of Early Scots historical writing. Instead he began with the impact of the Norman Conquest on the English language, before moving on to the vernacular chronicles.
Warton decided to give no account of Anglo-Saxon poetry, ostensibly because it lay before "that era, when our national character began to dawn", though doubtless really because his knowledge of the language was too slight to serve him. The first volume, published in 1774 with a second edition the following year, is prefaced with two dissertations: one on "The Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe", which he believed to lie in the Islamic world, and the other on "The Introduction of Learning into England", which deals with the revival of interest in Classical literature. He conceived of his work as tracing "the transitions from barbarism to civility" in English poetry, but alongside this view of progress went a Romantic love of medieval poetry for its own sake. Warton probably began researching the History in the 1750s, but did not actually begin writing in earnest until 1769.