ical, or that Goethe's
"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating
the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of
two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars.

On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and
artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a
strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail,
at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into
the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon,
therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as
romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar,
characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval
habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The
Revolt of Islam."

But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have
so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as
Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here.
It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly
every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular
meaning. In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything
that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat
in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art;
pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and
Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their
works." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority."
In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's
Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily
recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon
is a classic.[4]

Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a
shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for
_sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident
derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or
appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the
Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of
_romance_ is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the
corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_. T