feeling interrupted.  Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world—­though only by clothing them in classic garb.  How different to the ‘artificial rust’ of ‘Christabel’; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of ‘We Are Seven’; and to the rude ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’!  When at last, with the fall of Napoleon, the great stars—­Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature Landor—­rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as their parent.  They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar.  They contended for national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic soil.  Byron’s enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in Italy.  Compared with what we may call these classical members of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle Ages.  In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman.  It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of the Romantic school.” [5]

As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats it is misleading.  Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton!  More romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, treats subjects from the antique!  On the contrary, if “the name is graven on the workmanship,” “Michael” and “The Brothers” are as classical as “Hyperion” or “Laodamia” or “The Hamadryad”; “bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.”  Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson.  And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his “suggestive and adumbrative manner”—­not, indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet “quite distinct from the classical”; i.e., because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry.  But whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his best was a romantic poet.  “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic movement.