on" (1780) a rich composite of
materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French
romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12]

From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second
hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth
century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English
most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the
_Aufklaerung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical,
common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical
writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the
department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like
Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most
brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to
this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to
recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and
popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and
the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these
beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.

In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break
with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which
had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more
violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence
had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the
vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because
Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of
the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of
German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz,
Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift
and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We
have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as
Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend
older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen
that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with
literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In
England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton,
and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval
poetry and