Before, however, these words could acquire the potent meanings which they bear to-day, they had to run the gauntlet of the Age of Reason, with its hatred of all enthusiasm and fanaticism. And it was out of the ridicule and distrust which they encountered at its hands that the important new epithet _romantic_, together with some obsolete terms like _romancy_, _romancical_, _romantical_, ... was born. With its meaning of ‘like the old romances’ (and therefore barbarous, fantastic), _romantic_ was one of those adjectives, like _enthusiastic_, _extravagant_, _Gothic_, by which the later seventeenth, and the eighteenth century expressed their disapproval of everything which did not bear the stamp of reason and polite society. It was soon applied to people whose heads were stuffed out with the ballooning extravagancies of the old romances, just as _enthusiastic_ was employed to describe superstitious people who believed themselves distended with a special variety of divine inspiration. Above all, it had the sense of fabulous, unreal, unnatural. “Can anything,” asked Bishop South, “be imagined more profane and impious, absurd, and indeed romantic?” But at the beginning of the eighteenth century this meaning developed a little farther. _Romantic_ was now used of places, or aspects of Nature, of the kind among which the old Romances had been set. It was noticed that “romantic” people displayed a preference for wild landscapes and ruined castles, and would even “fancy” these things, where more rational people could see nothing more exciting than a tumbledown barn and a dirty ditch. And it is this particular shade of meaning, together with a strong suggestion of absurdity and unreality, which the word seems still to have conveyed to Jane Austen, who preferred to use _picturesque_ in contexts where we should now employ _romantic_ in its approving or non-committal sense. Had one of her heroines, however, succeeded in emerging from that endless round of incredibly dull activities which she contrives to make so incredibly interesting, and had this enterprising young woman then attempted to breast the intellectual currents of the age, she would have been startled to find that that sarcastic consciousness of a war between sense and sensibility, which was her creator’s inspiration, was a spent stream flowing from the remote past. For while echoes of the original thinking of men like Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke continued to rumble and reverberate on in the disparaging implications carried by a word like _romantic_, a new note had already become audible beneath them as long ago as the beginning of the century. It was an undertone of reluctant approval. These “romantic” notions might be absurd, but they were at least pleasant. “We do not care for seeing through the falsehood,” wrote Addison, “and willingly give ourselves up to so agreeable an imposture.”