As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats’ “Isabella.” [54] “This one short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of Sophocles.  But the action, the story?  The action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null.  Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the ‘Decameron’; he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express.”

A sentence or two from Arnold’s essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave this part of our subject.  “Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school of Germany—­Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter. . . .  The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them.  Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the power of modern ideas.”

And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt.  There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and speech.  Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds’ portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the hoop-skirt, the talon rouge—­all these have receded so far into the perspective as to acquire picturesqueness.  To Scott’s generation they seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail were poetically remote.  But so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, begins to have a romanticness of its own.  It is now some quarter century since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales.  Girl babies in large numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda.  Book illustrators like Kate Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art.  The