Now the Antique was one of the cudgels with which the Classicists tried to beat the heads of the Romanticists in the battles of that time. It did not mean to Gautier what it meant to them. Its metamorphosis was simultaneous with the birth of the East, and had almost the same cause. Insisting on local colour in places, the Romanticists insisted also on local colour in humanity. Cromwell was to be allowed to say that he had the parliament in his bag and the king in his pocket. Cæsar was to be allowed to talk like a man and even to be one. So that for Gautier Antiquity meant not a cold inhumanity that had been beautiful, but a warm, full-blooded life that worshipped simple, energetic gods, and found expression in a thousand ways other than the speech of blank verse and heroic actions that had been so often represented in pictures of an annoying timidity of colouring. The East and the Antique together had been touched as if by magic, and turned from the abstract into the concrete, from the heroic into the human, and so into the very material for personal expression. [The East and Arcadia.] Gautier's attitude towards the East is not unlike that of the Elizabethans towards Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, soldier, and busy statesman, wrote in terms of shepherds, shepherdesses, and shipwrecked princes, and worked in an ideal atmosphere where no cares were greater than love, or a thorn in a lamb's foot. He, with 'A sweet attractive kinde of grace A full assurance given by lookes, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of gospel bookes,' seemed to belong to that Golden Age which has never been now, but always long ago. And Gautier, busy writer of articles and travel-books, massive and vividly alive, could not persuade himself to be Parisian and contemporary. Nor would it be extravagant to compare him with the pastoral writers of to-day, Celtic and Gaelic, who like him lift their emotions into a simpler, more congenial atmosphere, and like him insist continually on the local colour of their dreams. These writers, sitting in London or in Edinburgh, hear, without moving from their comfortable chairs, the cry of the curlew on the moor, and are transported to a quiet bay, half enclosed by cliffs, 'in two white curves, like the wings of the solander when she hollows them as she breasts the north wind,' and under the spells of an intenser imagined life find their own emotions more vivid and more easily expressed. Gautier, sitting in Paris, sees the swallows fluttering about the roofs and flying south in autumn. 'Je comprends tout ce qu'elles disent, Car le poète est un oiseau; Mais captif ses élans se brisent Contre un invisible réseau! Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes! Comme dans le chant de Ruckert, Pour voler, là-bas avec elles Au soleil d'or, au printemps vert!'