In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which had followed academic traditions.  Here the insurrection was far more violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of the Queen Anne classics in England.  It was easy for the new school of German poets and critics to brush aside perruques like Opitz, Gottsched, and Gellert—­authors of the fourth and fifth class.  But Swift and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of.  We have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope’s supremacy and to recommend older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen that Horace Walpole’s Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole.  In England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains.  But in Germany there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere for this.

In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the appearance of the Romantische Schule in the stricter sense—­of Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouque, Von Arnim, Brentano, and Uhland.  In England this was owing less to arrested development than to the absence of genius.  There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order:  Akenside, Shenstone, Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, the boy Chatterton.  If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative importance.  Gray’s purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his life.  Collins’ derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist.  Thomson, perhaps, came too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism.  In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller.  But there the movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader tides of literary life.  English romanticism was but one among many contemporary tendencies:  sentimentalism, naturalism, realism.  German romanticism was simply an incident of the sturm-