and Percy.

All the poems here spoken of, with the exception of The Deserted Village, were conceived, and all, save the Macpherson two poems of Goldsmith, were written, before the death of George the Second. With the beginning of the new reign came the publication of two books whose influence on the literature of the Continent, if not on that of their own country, it is impossible to overrate. These are Macpherson's Ossian and Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The former belongs to the years 1760 to 1763; the latter to 1765. What was the exact nature of the impulse which each of these gave to the romantic revival?

It was, broadly speaking, to deepen the strain of sadness still further, to strengthen it with the swift rush of tragic action, to charge it with the wail of wistful longing, with the muffled beat of despondency and despair. The former was the special contribution of the Reliques, the latter of Fingal and Temora. And it would be hard to say which of the two had the greater influence on the general temper of the age, which of them can claim the larger share in shaping the particular course taken by the current of

romance.

Their influ

To gauge the full effect produced by these works, we must turn, as Wordsworth insisted, to the literature of the Continent. Glance at the ence on the earliest and most popular of Goethe's works, and we still see it is in the language of Ossian that Werther bids farewell to life and nerves himself for the quest of death. Pass

Continent.

on two generations later, and we shall find echoes of Ossian in the sincerest and most passionate of those who created the "literature of despair." Take the political movement of the intervening years, and once more it is the strained emphasis, it is often the very imagery, of Ossian which inspires the vapourings of the Carmagnoles and the full blooded rhetoric of Napoleon. It is the same with Herder, it is the same with Chateaubriand.

The direct influence of the Reliques was probably confined within a narrower circle. It was less popular, more distinctly literary, in its operation. But within this narrower circle it told with incalculable force. It moulded those who themselves moulded the literary temper of the time. The mark of the Reliques is indelibly stamped on the poems of Chatterton. They furnished the direct model to Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and are the dominant influence on his original poetry. In Germany they were eagerly seized both by scholar and by poet. They supplied one of its keenest weapons to the armoury of Wolf. They stand in the foreground of the Pantheon of Herder. They were the "matins and evensong" of Bürger. Without them the ballads of Goethe and Schiller, as without them The Ancient Mariner and The Three Graves, could hardly have been written as they are.

The tragic motive, the tragic atmosphere-these, then, are the main things given by the Reliques and -Ossian to the romantic movement. To these, two

1 See the earlier novels of George Sand; in particular, Lelia.

things further must be added. The first, the cult of popular poetry, is closely connected with the preceding, and it explains itself. But it is significant that the seed thus sown bore direct fruit rather in Germany than in Britain. It was not from Percy, but from Ramsay and Fergusson, that Burns drew his inspiration. And when Wordsworth and Scott, the one in Pastoral the other in Romance, took up the theme, it was not to the heard melodies of the people's song, but to the unheard melodies of their speech and action, that they gave voice. The original motive, thanks to the privilege of genius, was almost lost in the variations. In Germany it was different. Lessing and Herder in criticism and translation, Bürger and Goethe in original poetry, all owed and acknowledged a direct debt to the initiative of Percy.

Their treat

The other point, on which, however, some reserva tion must be made, is an awakened sense of the' mysterious, the supernatural. The reserva ment of the tion is demanded on two grounds. It is supernatural. needed because, as will at once be admitted, some signs of that quality are to be traced even in earlier writers. It is needed because neither in the Reliques nor even in Ossian is the evidence of it so strong as is sometimes thought.

Firstly, then, a sense of mystery and even of the supernatural is to be found in writers of the preceding generation. It must be allowed, for instance, beyond question to Collins. His earlier odes offer numberless touches of the former. His Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, to which may be

added his Ode to Fear, is one unbroken witness to the latter. Yet a moment's reflection will show how timidly, we might almost say reluctantly, that witness is given. In the very act of welcoming the supernatural, Collins-perhaps with the shrinking instinctive to his malady-betrays that he mistrusts it. He holds it at arm's length. He rather suffers his imagination to play around it from without than strives to bring it forth, as his own creation, from within. He rather suggests it as a poetic theme for others, for the inoffending author of Douglas in particular, than seeks to grapple with it boldly in his own strength. Contrast his Scottish ode with The Ancient Mariner or with Lenore, contrast it even with the Halloween of Burns, and we recognise at a glance how guarded he was in drawing on the treasures of the new region which his genius had discovered.

On the other hand, it must in fairness be allowed that neither in the Reliques, nor even in Ossian, is any overwhelming stress laid on the supernatural. In the Reliques-apart from the Arthurian Ballads, which, it is safe to say, made less impression than any other part of the book-it is seldom that any trace of it is to be found. In King Estmere there is a touch, a rather perfunctory touch, of "gramarye." In Sweet William's Ghost the supernatural is more boldly handled, and there are some few other instances. But, taken together, they cannot be said to amount to very much. With Ossian, no doubt, the case is different. Many of the best-known episodes bring us face to face with the form of the gods, with ap

paritions of the dead or the doomed. Yet even here the vein is hardly worked with the set purpose for which we might have looked. The bounds between the supernatural and the natural are faintly drawn, and the edge of the former is blunted accordingly. These incidents were stuff of the daily life of the Gael, and as such they are presented by Macpherson. There is little or no attempt to make the reader's flesh creep by their recital; no desire, as in the fullblown romanticists of the next generation, to freeze his blood by suggestion of ghastly detail.

So far, then, if judged by the course it took in Their resemblance England, had the romantic movement been carried before the year taken for

and contrast.

our starting-point (1775).

Interpreted in the wider sense, Romance had already done much to bring the world of emotion once more within the range of imaginative art. Gray and Collins had idealised the mood of contemplation and melancholy. The Reliques and Ossian had deepened the vein of tragedy, which first comes to the surface in the odes of Collins. The poetry of outward nature had been discovered anew by Thomson and explored by men as different as Gray and Goldsmith, Falconer and Collins, and all this had widened the horizon of man's vision; it had awakened a new sense of wonder in his heart.

Understood in the narrower sense, the romantic movement had as yet barely entered on its course. If Chatterton and Collins and the later poems of