is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to
creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning.
Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as
such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished
to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations,
reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons and
grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle
plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as
these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have
swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily
stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the case
of Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a light
charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count.
Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important
from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the
history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a
century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since
superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse
mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated
the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of
the _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is
rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which
has been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casual
contact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life.

Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the
history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the
movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd
asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the
institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated
readers would find something deserving attention in old English
minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when
Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took
up the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution was
complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all
Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and

"High-piled books in