peare. . . . For the works of Calderon bear
most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages,
particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry and
monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose
poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical
perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with
fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the
fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in
'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in
'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is
superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried
up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple
poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth." Heine
adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the
mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again
and fell to lisping.

There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothers
in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like the
Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country,
and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also in
that their best service was done in the field of literary history,
criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of
comparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance
"Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures
on the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages of
India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and
translator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblance
between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here,
as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The
Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a
kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities
to a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm in
antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning
and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and
grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are
mere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly