be more discriminatingly, admired by those who are very
much out of sympathy with him on not a few points of subject, but who
are one with him in the Humanities--in the sense and the love of the
great things in literature.

The natural and logical line of development, however, from the
originators of the Romantic movement through Keats and Tennyson did not
lie through Matthew Arnold; and the time was not yet ripe--it can
perhaps hardly be said to be ripe yet--for a reaction in his sense. He
was, as has been said, a branch from Wordsworth, only slightly
influenced by Tennyson himself, than whom indeed he was not so very much
younger. The direct male line of descent lay in another direction; and
its next most important stage was determined by the same causes which
almost at the middle of the century or a little before brought about
Prae-Raphaelitism in art. Both of these were closely connected with the
set of events called the Oxford Movement, about which much has been
written, but of which the far-reaching significance, not merely in
religion but in literature, politics, art, and almost things in general,
has never yet been fully estimated. As far as literature is concerned,
and this special part of literature with which we are here dealing, this
movement had partly shown and partly shaped the direction of the best
minds towards the Middle Ages, which had been begun by Percy's
_Reliques_ in a vague and blind sort of way, and which had been
strengthened, directed, but still not altogether fashioned according to
knowledge, by Scott and Coleridge.

This movement which dominates the whole English poetry of the later half
of the century with the exception of that produced by a few survivors of
the older time, and to which no successor of equal brilliancy and
fertility has yet made its appearance, is popularly represented by three
writers, two of whom, Mr. William Morris and Mr. Swinburne, are
fortunately still alive, and therefore fall out of our province.
Rossetti, the eldest of the three, a great influence on both, and as it
happens an example unique in all history of combined excellence in
poetry and painting, has passed away for some years, and will give us
quite sufficient text for explaining the development and illustrating
its results without outstripping the limits traced in the preface to
this book; while his sister, and a distinguished junior member of the
school, also dead, Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, may profitably