and Goethe’s residence at Strasburg had much to do with _Goetz von Berlichingen_. When, on the other hand, the Northern man is initiated into the beauties of Italian architecture, his romantic feeling is apt to wane, as he himself admits: _’Tis not for centuries four for nought Our European world of thought Hath made familiar to its home The classic mind of Greece and Rome; In all new work that would look forth To more than antiquarian worth, Palladio’s pediments and bases, Or something such, will find their places: Maturer optics don’t delight In childish dim religious light, In evanescent vague effects That shirk, not face, one’s intellects; They love not fancies just betrayed, And artful tricks of light and shade, Put pure form nakedly displayed, And all things absolutely made._ The feeling thus expressed by Clough, speaking through the mouth of the Devil, is utterly contrary to the mystic awe and vague apprehension of infinity characteristic of romantic art. It is no wonder, therefore, that the movement engendered towards the middle of the eighteenth century by impatience with the prosaic present and reaction towards the neglected Middle Age, favoured by the moral atmosphere created by Rousseau, and for England and Germany so imperious a necessity that Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Novalis and Tieck, all romanticists from the cradle, appeared in the world within three years, should have been little heard of in Italy until Scott and Goethe had captivated the youthful genius of Manzoni. Yet a streak of romantic light had preceded, though from quite a different quarter, namely, Ossian. If the Gaelic bard’s antiquity was questionable, he was not the less acceptable to a modern imagination; and the prodigious success in all European nations of what would have been universally derided thirty years sooner, showed that new tastes and new cravings had been awakened among them. Of these Italy had her share, as attested, towards the end of the eighteenth century, by the vogue of the translation of Ossian by Cesarotti.