police; the life of countrymen who took
their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any
wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review,
from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church;
and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with
varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy.

THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.--Still even in England, the mediaeval
revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on
practice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford
Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in
Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a
painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis
Oliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engaged
as a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man
of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revival
which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious
antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds
that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated
tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "the
clerical and architectural proclivities of the day," and had visited and
studied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me.
Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his
mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of
saints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow
plate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising the
sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of
self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery
and every twist of the lay figure."

Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford
movement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to prove
the reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement.
Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_
for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reaction
from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the
literature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned
the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's min