arts, the discovery and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and mediaeval life.  Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though, in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later forms of the religion had been interrupted.  One has but to compare the list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between 1400 and 1700.  What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their equivalents be found in all England?

The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of seeming to adopt a narrow method.  Yet it would be unphilosophical to consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time.  For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters; and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color—­that is, of emotion and imagination—­into English life and thought:  into the Church, into politics, into philosophy.  Romanticism, which sought to evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself in the writings of Richardson and Sterne.  Corresponding to these on the Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Heloise” and Goethe’s “Sorrows of Werther.”

Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton.  It was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of the time.  Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and naturalism.  He explains, to be sure, that the first English sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but romantic.  “A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his feelings[4] by describing some past state of society.  He would paint some ideal society in mediaeval times