Romanticism appears to be closely connected with it.

It is an alluring subject to investigate. How the progress of
scholarship, the recent 'finds' of archaeology, the extension of
travelling along Mediterranean shores, the political enthusiasms
evoked by the stirrings of young Italy and young Greece, all combined
to reawaken in the poetical imagination of the times the dormant
memories of antiquity has not yet been told by the historians of
literature. [Footnote: At least as far as England is concerned. For
France, cf. Canat, _La renaissance de la Grece antique_, Hachette,
Paris, 1911.]

But--and this is sufficient for our purpose--every one knows what the
Elgin Marbles have done for Keats and Shelley; and what inspirations
were derived from their pilgrimages in classic lands by all the poets
of this and the following generation, from Byron to Landor. Such
experiences could not but react on the common conception of mythology.
A knowledge of the great classical sculpture of Greece could not but
invest with a new dignity and chastity the notions which so far had
been nurtured on the Venus de' Medici and the Belvedere Apollo--even
Shelley lived and possibly died under their spell. And 'returning to
the nature which had inspired the ancient myths', the Romantic poets
must have felt with a keener sense 'their exquisite vitality'.
[Footnote: J. A, Symonds, _Studies of the Greek Poets_, ii, p. 258.]
The whole tenor of English Romanticism may be said to have been
affected thereby.

For English Romanticism--and this is one of its most distinctive
merits--had no exclusiveness about it. It was too spontaneous, one
would almost say, too unconscious, ever to be clannish. It grew,