ter
forms of the religion had been interrupted. One has but to compare the
list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company
that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a
suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between
1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner,
the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their
equivalents be found in all England?

The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English
romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of
seeming to adopt a narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to
consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of
its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time.
For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters;
and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is,
of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the
Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to
evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was
but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness
of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the
idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by
Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself
in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on the
Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and
his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's
"Nouvelle Heloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther."

Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste
cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses
like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It
was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer
environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out
of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than
it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of
the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the
three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and
naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English
sentimentalist