nt throughout
Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that
element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national
past; in other words, mediaevalism.

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much.
Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of
Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are
romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is
romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an
idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve
the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I
think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for
omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not
accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was
not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a
link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my
justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth
Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_
of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The
public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading
his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."

But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my
design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add
that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are
described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single
point of view. H. A. B.

APRIL, 1901.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. WALTER SCOTT

II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY

III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL

IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY

V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE

VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.

CHAPTER I.

Walter Scott.[1]

It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the
historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his
eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the
true enchanter's wand, th