such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the
'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little
elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He,
however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any
one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the
classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of
which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in
that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the
classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply
distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.
Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor
with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him;
Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what
is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the
last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to
classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed
the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the
'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of
Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German
literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested
themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique
character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when
the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted.
Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by
translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own
people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though only
by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust'
of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven';
and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall