s "Reliques" in
boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the
line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is
remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too
was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast
apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in
the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to
be his own antiquary.

As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always
a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which
they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of
medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it
was still in manuscript. Much more of it was in old and rare printed
copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great
libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in
dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle
High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric
tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for
the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern
reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions,
translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic
words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were
gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of
investigation. Every side of medieval life has received illustration in
its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the
collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and
Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46),
Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94),
Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages"
(1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion"
(1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned
societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early
English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken
at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are
instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to
all who might choose to make acquaintance with it.

The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been