“I dreamed I was a virginal—­
  The gilt one of Saint Cecily’s.”

The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles, rococo pastorals.  The lady in “The Gallery of Pigeons” sits at her broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls.  At night she sleeps in the northern tower where

  “Above all tracery, carven flower,
  And grim gurgoil is her bower-window”;

and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice,

  “And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight,”

and higher still, the banderolle flutters

  “At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak.”

In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother’s chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies.  Mr. Stedman quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody: 

  “They chase them each, below, above,—­
  Half madden’d by their minstrelsy,—­
    Thro’ garths of crimson gladioles;
  And, shimmering soft like damoisels,
  The angels swarm in glimmering shoals,
    And pin them to their aureoles,
  And mimick back their ritournels.”

This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known verses in Punch: 

  “Glad lady mine, that glitterest
    In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn;
  Canst tell me whether is bitterest,
    The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?”

This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest of the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden.  The artistic movement had invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers.  Du Maurier became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and quackery.

THE REACTION.—­Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting literary modes coexist.  There was some romantic poetry written in Pope’s time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53] But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own way down to the middle of the century.  Then reaction set in and the stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements.  This reaction expressed itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention three:  realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival.