ests, while Romantic literature has become
remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not mean that the men of the
later seventeenth century believed in the gods and Achilles, but not in
the saints and Arthur. It means that classical literature was found best
to imitate for its form. The greater classical writers had described the
life of man, as they saw it, in direct and simple language, carefully
ordered by art. After a long apprenticeship of translation and
imitation, modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with
modern matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used
allegorically and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with
some traditional ornament and fable, became the matter of poetry.

A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question is
involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long
record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man--books,
and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach
whole generations to interpret the world. Because they throw light on
the life of man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up in a position
of authority. Then they generate other books; and literature, receding
further and further from the source of truth, becomes bookish and
conventional, until those who have been taught to see nature through the
spectacles of books grow uneasy, and throw away the distorting glasses,
to look at nature afresh with the naked eye. They also write books, it
may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who produce a literature no
less servile than the literature it supplants.

This movement of the sincere and independent human mind is found in the
great writers of all periods, and is called the Return to Nature. It is
seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in _The Rape of the Lock_ no
less than in _Peter Bell_. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic,
and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in
that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted
conventions of the late literary epic. The _Iliad_ is the story of a
quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more
distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the
immediate cause? The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an
Italian city; the shifting of a reading-desk from one position to another
in a French church; the playful theft of a lock of