In 1783 William Blake produced his _Poetical Sketches_, and
George Crabbe published _The Village_. In 1832 Scott died, not many
months after the death of Goethe. Between these two dates a great
company of English writers produced a literature of immense bulk, and of
almost endless diversity of character. Yet one dominant strain in that
literature has commonly been allowed to give a name to the whole period,
and it is often called the Age of the Romantic Revival.
We do not name other notable periods of our literature in this fashion.
The name itself contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a new
philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It attempts to describe as well
as to name, and attaches significance not to kings, or great authors, but
to the kind of writing which flourished conspicuously in that age. A
less ambitious and much more secure name would have been the Age of
George III; but this name has seldom been used, perhaps because the
writers of his time who reverenced King George III were not very many in
number. The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that
the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate,
and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is
left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the
sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being
reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge.


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