yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened
between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman
state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish
accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle
Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe
continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries
before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery
and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and
the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and
mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though,
in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later
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