knew very well what that life must have been in reality:  its insecurity from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any wheeled vehicle.  As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy.

THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.—­Still even in England, the mediaeval revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on practice and belief in other spheres of thought.  Thus the Oxford Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in Germany.  At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis Oliphant—­afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist—­engaged as a designer.  He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man of pietistic feelings who had “thrown himself into the Gothic revival which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination.”  Scott adds that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of “the clerical and architectural proclivities of the day,” and had visited and studied the French cathedrals.  “These workshops were a surprise to me.  Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of saints and virgins—­Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow plate behind his head—­yet by constant drill in the groove realising the sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery and every twist of the lay figure.”

Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford movement on the fine arts.  It would be easy to call witnesses to prove the reverse—­the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement.  Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the British Critic for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism “as a reaction from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation, or century. . . .  First, I mentioned the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men’s minds to the direction of the Middle Ages.  ‘The general need,’ I said, ’of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he reacted on his readers,