The History of English Poetry favourable response to the first edition. "The Gentleman's Magazine", reviewing the first volume, called it "this capital historical piece", and had no doubt that "every connoisseur will be curious to view the original, and impatient for the completion of it". Of the third volume the same magazine wrote that it "does equal credit to Mr. Warton's taste, judgment, and erudition, and makes us impatiently desirous of more". Edward Gibbon mentioned the "History" in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", saying it had been accomplished "with the taste of a poet and the minute diligence of an antiquarian". But
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire as a popularization of Eysenck's articles and books criticizing psychoanalysis, and wrote that it was "not really meant for academic consumption." He criticized Eysenck's account of psychoanalytic therapy, writing that it bore little resemblance to modern psychoanalytic therapy, and wrote that Eysenck evaluated psychoanalysis using experimental evidence that was not methodologically adequate, or which in some cases actually provided weak support for psychoanalytic concepts such as repression. The psychologist Stephen Frosh described "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" as one of a number of books in which Eysenck acted as a "propagandist" for the view that psychoanalysis is unscientific