But in the narrower sense of the word—­the sense which controls in these inquiries—­the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death of Scott in 1832.  Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850.  Both had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative literature.  Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859.  The mediaevalism of Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the century.  The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the romantic school proper in Germany bears to Buerger and Herder, and to Goethe and Schiller in their younger days.  That is to say, their mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final.

We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning.  Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations, reprints of old texts, critical editions.  Middle English lexicons and grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like.  Numerous and valuable as these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly.  They have swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes—­as in the case of Chatterton and of Keats—­goes off at a touch and carries but a light charge of learning.  In literary history it is the beginnings that count.  Child’s great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important from the scholar’s point of view than Percy’s “Reliques.”  But in the history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a century later.  Mallet’s “Histoire de Dannemarc” has been long since superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated the “Northern Antiquities.”  But it is not the history of the revival of the knowledge of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which has been kindled by contact—­perhaps a very slight and casual contact—­with the transmitted image of mediaeval life.