But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for literature?  In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal.  It had relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative activity.  There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century:  a generation fed upon “Ossian” and Rousseau and “The Sorrows of Werther” and Percy’s “Reliques” and Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances.  Again, in the department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been accomplished.  Books like Tyrwhitt’s “Chaucer” and Warton’s “History of English Poetry” had a real importance, while the collection and preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor.

But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern literature of England, the reply is disappointing.  No one will maintain that the Rowley poems, “Caractacus,” “The Monk,” “The Grave of King Arthur,” “The Friar of Orders Gray,” “The Castle of Otranto,” and “The Mysteries of Udolpho” are things of permanent value:  or even that “The Bard,” “The Castle of Indolence,” and the “Poems of Ossian” take rank with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Rossetti, and William Morris.  The two leading British poets of the fin du siecle, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists.  It was left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the eighteenth only prophesied.

[1] Scherer’s “History of German Literature,” Conybeare’s Translation, Vol.  II, p. 26.

[2] Scherer, Vol.  II. pp. 123-24.

[3] See ante, pp. 300-301.

[4] See ante, pp. 337-38.

[5] “The Beauties of Shakspere.  Regularly selected from each Play.  With a general index.  Digesting them under proper heads.”  By the Rev. Wm. Dodd, 1752.

[6] “Es war nicht blos die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare zog, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefuehl, das hier germanische Art und Kunst sei.”—­Hettner’s Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 3.3.1. s. 51.  “Ist zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den Franzosen zu den stammverwandten Englaendern . . . in ihrem geschichtlichen Ursprung und Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung des erstarkten germanischen Volksnaturells gegen die erdrueckende Uebermacht der romanischen Formenwelt war,” etc.—­Ibid. s. 47.  See also, ss. 389-95, for a review of the interpretation of the great Shaksperian roles by German actors like Schroeder and Fleck.

[7] “Wir hoeren einen Nachklang jener froehlichen Unterhaltungen, in denen die Freunde sich ganz und gar in Shakepear’schen Wendungen und Wortwitzen ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare’s ’Love’s Labour’s Lost’”—­Hettner, s. 244.