commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which
remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and
fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If
the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the
reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The
Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France,"
already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation
which had a very exact counterpart in England.


[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the
past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up
nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless
dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors
to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors
which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful
only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature
which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting
of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and
antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows
them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First
American Edition, 1860).

[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonnë Prestës Tale_:

"This story is also trewe, I undertake,
As is the book of Launcelot de Lake,
That women hold in ful gret reverence."

[3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap