. . . when the strains of the Troubadours were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?” Chateaubriand says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or pointed architecture the arches “form a contrast with the circular arches of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon.  The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of voids, the more readily admits of the decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders.  The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables.  The house-leek fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in festoons over the arches.”

All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists.  His literary taste was by no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards.  In speaking of Milton, e.g., he says that if he had only been born in France in the reign of Louis XIV., and had “combined with the native grandeur of his genius the taste of Racine and Boileau,” the “Paradise Lost” might have equalled the “Iliad.”

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic.  It is agreed upon all hands that the expressions romantisme and litterature romantique were first invented or imported by Madame de Stael in her “L’Allemagne” (1813), “pour exprimer l’affranchissement des vieilles formes litteraires.” [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal published his “Racine et Shakspere,” the issue between the schools had been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian journals.  Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his temper was decidedly cool and unromantic.  I have quoted his epigrammatic definition of romanticism.[35]

In this brochure Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the romanticists.  A company of English actors who attempted to give some of Shakspere’s