stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.’” Of Coleridge he spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as “two living poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the same direction.”  Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott’s verse as well as of his prose.[3]

Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which affiliates with Catholic tendencies.  “Mediaevalism . . . was a distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages.  One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs.  His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness of the Mediaeval Church—­of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . .  As Scott’s imagination was fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism—­with its jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins—­so Newman’s imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . .  Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of souls, and to impose once more on men’s imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in the world’s affairs. . . .  Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves through their mediaevalism.  Scott’s luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but more intrinsically hopeless task—­that of re-creating the whole English Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions.” [4]