the direct representative of God in the
world's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves
through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his
private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval
colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but
more intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole English
Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions." [4]

All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which
romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to
Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of
romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic,"
"spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers
the last enchantments of the Middle Age," and "ever calling us nearer
to . . . beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of the
masters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon general
literature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra
Innocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss and
Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and even
found an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford"
represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" and
Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment.
Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The author
of 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute of
this divine element [poetry]; . . . vestments chucked off, lights
quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship
annihilated; . . . the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of
wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the
mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the
tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not." [5] Newman praises
in "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and to
the unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoors
through a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, and
coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make
church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole,
it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church
polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the la