about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon
contemporary letters.

Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the
exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from
the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy,
Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and
made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer,
Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as
classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and
Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception,
like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and
Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then,
as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its
inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great
violence to the usual critical employment of the word. I say _early_
literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like
"Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which
are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our
own time. With works like these, though they are perhaps the most
characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not
concerned.

It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of
mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists,
contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant
pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouqué give no
faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in
all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression