that the members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their personal and accidental conditions.  As if they had only lived together, and not worked together!  In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules.  Unbending uniformity is death!  Let us be various and individual as life itself is. . . .  Away with dry Rationalism!  Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village.  Let us abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life.  These were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such changes as local differences demanded.  Individuality in person, nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed.  And, as these men, when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such elements as ‘romantic,’ so may they themselves be justly called the ‘Romantic School.’  But the term is much misused, and requires a little elucidation.  Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet.  He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any one had applied it to him.  The term presupposes opposition to the classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of the French Revolution.  On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott’s circle all branched off from the classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.  Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is called the ‘pig-tail period’!  The principal poems composed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to classic tradition.  In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of the ‘Dunciad,’ and the moral poems of Rogers that of the ‘Essay on Man.’  Landor wrote his youthful ‘Gebir’ in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself.  The amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique character—­for ‘Iphigenia,’ ‘Proserpina,’ ‘Alexis and Dora.’  Only when the war with France drew near was the classical