chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth
century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both
in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection;
and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and
Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all
educated readers.

As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my
definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his
own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I
have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English
literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation
of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the
Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use
of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I
prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the
Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those
more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness
of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one
of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.

M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is
the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo,
and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny that
Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is
lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of
_romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself is
respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous
definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others
are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a