By the middle of the eighteenth
century there was no notable kind of Greek or Latin
literature--historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, ode,
satire--which had not worthy disciples and rivals in the literatures of
France and England. Nothing remained to do but to go further afield and
seek for new masters. These might easily have been found among the poets
and prophets of the East, and not a few notable writers of the time began
to forage in that direction. But the East was too remote and strange,
and its languages were too little known, for this attempt to be carried
far; the imitation of Chinese and Persian models was practised chiefly by
way of fantasy and joke. The study of the neglected and forgotten matter
of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was undertaken by serious
scholars. The progress of the mediaeval influence reproduced very
exactly the successive phases of the Classical Renaissance. At first
there was study; and books like Sainte Palaye's _Memoirs of Ancient
Chivalry_, and Paul Henri Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_, enjoyed a
European reputation. Then followed the period of forgery and imitation,
the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy.
Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original
literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter Scott,
Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the
sceptic, in the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival;
and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth
century was the rebellion of a child against its parents.
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