s of the eighteenth century, it is observable that the
English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries
for their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated or
imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the
modern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughts
upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no
such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French
romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du
Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force,
even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to
contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations
like Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824);
Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The
Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807).
By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante."

Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English
imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the
Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his
followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English
scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of
the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington
and Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a very
accomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other
romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually
upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction:

"In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,
And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow
No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre,
That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3]

Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But
the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant
pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing
chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is
serious, but submits his romantic matter--Godfrey of Boulogne and the
First Crusade--to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy,
but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fr