There is no need to distinguish carefully between
poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A
great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of
pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of
pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for
story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires
that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a
romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are
portrayed? And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been
taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes,
among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset,
cast on gleaming lakes. These were the theatre of Romance; and the
emotions awakened by scenes like these played an enormous part in the
Revival. It was thus that poets were educated to find that exaltation in
the terrors of mountainous regions which Gray expressed when he said:
"Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with
religion and poetry."

The weaker side of modern Romance, the play-acting and pretence that has
always accompanied it, may be seen in the gardening mania. It was not
enough to be a country gentleman; the position must be improved by the
added elegances of a hermit's cell and an Egyptian pyramid. It is like
children's play; the day is long, the affairs of our elders are tedious,
we are tired of a life in which there is no danger and no hunger; let us
pretend that we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature imagination
interprets the facts; this kind of imagination escapes from the facts
into a world of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause and effect is
no longer felt. It is not a hard word to call it childish; the
imagination of these early Romantics had a child's weakness and a child's
delightful confidence and zest.

The same play activity expressed itself in literature, where an orgy of
imitation ushered in the real movement. The antiquarian beginnings of
Romantic poetry may be well illustrated by the life and works of Thomas
Warton. He passed his life as a resident Fellow of Trinity College,
Oxford, and devoted his leisure, which was considerable, to the study of
English poetry and Gothic architecture. He was not yet thirty when, in
1757, he was