vogue in Wordsworth's
boyhood to Macpherson's _Ossian_, a book which whether it be completely
fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the
romantic movement.

The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a
more important literary event--the publication of Bishop Percy's edition
of the ballads in the Percy folio--the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_.
Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew
themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and
plainness of his originals. Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter
Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy,
and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and
smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is
more important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their
influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on
which he grafted them. Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_, which in many places
seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught
their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads
themselves. None the less, whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave
its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in
Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not
only directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern
study and love of the ballad which has given us _Sister Helen_, the
_White Ship_ and the _Lady of Shalott_.

But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous
of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes in human
outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an
extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its
countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of
thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It is more sensitive to
fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference. Outward
objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and
their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of
the human spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the
terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture
and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of
Greece--all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic