untrammelled by codes, uncrystallized into formulas, a living thing
always, not a subject-matter for grandiloquent manifestoes and more or
less dignified squabbles. It could therefore absorb and turn to
account elements which seemed antagonistic to it in the more
sophisticated forms it assumed in other literatures. Thus, whilst
French Romanticism--in spite of what it may or may not have owed to
Chenier--became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti-
classical, whilst for example [Footnote: As pointed out by Brunetiere,
_Evolution de la Poesie lyrique_, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that
all-comprehending _Legende des Siecles_ could find room for the Hegira
and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the
departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may
claim to have restored in freshness and purity the religion of
antiquity. Indeed their voice was so convincing that even the great
Christian chorus that broke out afresh in the Victorian era could not
entirely drown it, and Elizabeth Barrett had an apologetic way of
dismissing 'the dead Pan', and all the 'vain false gods of Hellas',
with an acknowledgement of

your beauty which confesses
Some chief Beauty conquering you.

This may be taken to have been the average attitude, in the forties,
towards classical mythology. That twenty years before, at least in the
Shelley circle, it was far less grudging, we now have definite proof.

Not only was Shelley prepared to admit, with the liberal opinion of
the time, that ancient mythology 'was a system of nature concealed
under the veil of allegory', a system in which 'a thousand fanciful
fables contained a secret and mystic meaning': [Footnote: _Edinb.