[11] See ante, pp. 99-101_._

[12] “Eighteenth Century Literature,” p. 397.

[13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” (1744) as, like Percy’s “Reliques,” a symptom of the return of the past.  Essay on “Gray.”

[14] “Eighteenth Century Literature,” pp. 401-03.

[15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as “a pert and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and illiberal as his life,” Vol.  II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806).

[16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a “Poem in Praise of Blank Verse” by Aaron Hill, “one of the very first persons who took notice of Thomson, on the publication of ‘Winter’”: 

    “Up from Rhyme’s poppied vale!  And ride the storm
    That thunders in blank verse!”
               —­Vol.  II. p. 186.

[17] See ante, p. 57.

[18] See ante, p. 181.

[19] To Richard West, April, 1742.

[20] See ante, p. 94.

CHAPTER VII.

The Gothic Revival.

One of Thomas Warton’s sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester.  Hurd was a friend of Gray and Mason, and his “Letters on Chivalry and Romance” (1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement.  They perhaps owed their inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye’s “Memoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie,” the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781.  This was a monumental work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the literature of its subject that Mallet’s “Histoire de Dannemarc” bears to all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the eighteenth-century.  Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval institutions but in old French dialects.  He went to the south of France to familiarize himself with Provencal:  collected a large library of Provencal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his “Histoire de Troubadours.”  Among his other works are a “Dictionary of French Antiquities,” a glossary of Old French, and an edition of “Aucassin et Nicolete.”  Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote “Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry” (1795), made an English translation of Sainte Palaye’s “History of the Troubadours” in 1779, and of his “Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry” in 1784.

The purpose of Hurd’s letters was to prove “the pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic.”  “The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries,” he affirms, “such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic romances.  Was