imagination of the poet, so the language in which the subject is presented should not be regulated by the mixed literary and social standard sanctioned by tradition, but should as closely as possible follow the diction of real life, particularly that of the peasantry. It is not difficult to see that if Wordsworth's views on these points be correct, then the practice of the great classical poets in all nations must have been completely wrong. IV. THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY. By his habits of severe and lonely meditation and of philosophical analysis, Wordsworth was well qualified to become the apostle of the new movement which, as Coleridge tells us, was inaugurated by the publication of Lyrical Ballads.' On the other hand, his remoteness from social life and action, and the studied prosiness of much of his versification, prevented his poems from making an immediate impression on the taste of an age imbued with reverence for the classical models of poetical diction. The shock which was felt by the imagination of society at the end of the eighteenth century, and which produced the vast development or the complete subversion of so many deeply-rooted feelings and ideas, exhibits its effects most distinctly in the work of those great writers whose names stand at the head of this paper. In this paper I shall endeavour to trace the rise of the new school of Romance in English Literature, its connection with the classical school of the eighteenth century, and the various channels into which it was directed by Scott, Byron, and Shelley. The genius of the eighteenth century in England was hostile to Romance in all its shapes. Almost every writer of the period is a disciple of Cervantes. The early part of the century produced the most exquisite and delicate satire on feudal Toryism in the person of Sir Roger de Coverley. Chivalrous feeling could scarcely breathe in the same atmosphere as Gulliver. Pope, whose mind was very open to the influences of the old-fashioned sentimental gallantry, boasts, nevertheless, that he soon abandoned Fancy's maze' to 'moralize his song.' Fielding found the inspiring motive for his own novels in his contempt for the sentimentalities of Richardson. Goldsmith, the finest artist of the school of Addison, shows himself utterly insensible to the influences that were operating on |