There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some obsolete author: "Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3] But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute as Donne, whom Carew had styled "--a king who ruled, as he thought fit, The universal monarch of wit": Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the first of the moderns. But, "Who now reads Cowley?"