“Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.”

Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality, the getting back of common speech into poetry.  But there was another, earlier and more potent in its effect.  The eighteenth century, weary of its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for picturesqueness and relief.  Romance of course, had not been dead in all these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the fashionable temper for writing.  There was a strong romantic tradition in the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the writing of the time.  Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances.  When he was in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the journey of a knight-errant.  “These fictions of the Gothic romances,” he said, “are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed.”  It is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with either Coleridge or Scott.  Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight.  As was natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two differed.  None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds.  “It was art,” said William Morris, “art in which all men shared, that made life romantic as people called it in those days.  That and not robber barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles, and other rubbish.”  Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages better.  To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the “other rubbish” were the essence of romance.  For Percy and his followers, medievalism was a collection of what actors call “properties” gargoyles, and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages, banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words.  Mistaking what was on its surface at any rate a subtle and complex civilization, for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into a freer air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind.

A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance.  To the fashion of the time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray’s Journal of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, it was at first and remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for those very theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in abhorrence.  Wordsworth, in his Lines written above Tintern Abbey, in which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental development, refers to this love of the mountains for their spectacular qualities, as the first step in the progress of his mind to poetic maturity: