It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope’s generation, including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling.  There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea’s ode “To the Nightingale”; in her “Nocturnal Reverie”; in Parnell’s “Night Piece on Death,” and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, “The Braces of Yarrow,” is certainly a strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century.  But these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency.  We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit.  There is commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which remains inarticulate, or nearly so.  It is this prevailing spirit and fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter.  If the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the reader should consult the chapters on “Classicism” and “The Pseudo-Classicists” in M. Pellisier’s “Literary Movement in France,” already several times referred to.  They describe a literary situation which had a very exact counterpart in England.

[1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the past ages—­not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction:  endeavors which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting of the armor itself, which he knew not. . .  His romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false.—­Ruskin, “Modern Painters," Vol.  III. p. 279 (First American Edition, 1860).

[2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the Nonne Prestes Tale: 

    “This story is also trewe, I undertake,
    As is the book of Launcelot de Lake,
    That women hold in ful gret reverence.”

[3] “History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,” Vol.  II. chap xii, section vii.

[4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings; romanticism through the imagination.

[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and naturalism—­a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism.  I condense the passage slightly:  “To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains.  Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to the fields and mountains; and, finding