ds to the
direction of the Middle Ages. 'The general need,' I said, 'of something
deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be
considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity
he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their
hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily
forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which
might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.'" Of Coleridge he
spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church
feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two living
poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in
that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same
high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the
same direction." Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well
as of his prose.[3]

Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which
affiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . was a
distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was
intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the
Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great
mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically
striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs.
His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness
of the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of
its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford
movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church
in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination was
fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with its
jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--so
Newman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and
ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . .
Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine
mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he
aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the
sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of
souls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell of
a hierarchical organisation,