There is, then, originally in this literature a distinct trace of the general European reaction against the eighteenth century. The strong national feeling which superseded the feeling of cosmopolitanism is to be found in England in Wordsworth in the form of patriotic poetical description, in Southey in the form of eulogy (at times partly, at times purely, official) of the Royal Family and the national exploits, in the Scottish-born Campbell in the form of passionately British songs of liberty and war; whilst Scott and Moore are positive literary personifications of Scotland and Ireland. The universal return to the popular has its chief representative and spokesman in Wordsworth, whose special theme is the life of the lower and lowest classes. The predilection for the Middle Ages is strongest in Scott, who combines the antiquarian's delight in memories and survivals of the past with the Tory politician's desire to represent the traditional in the most attractive light. The Romanticism of superstition finds its poet in Coleridge, whose studied childishness and simplicity are near of kin to Tieck's; and it is Coleridge, too, who, thoroughly imbued with the doctrines of the German philosophy of the day, enters a general scientific protest against those of the age of enlightenment. His philosophy is quite un-English; it is, in contradiction to the experimental nature of English science, purely transcendental; it is conservative, pious, and historical, because the philosophy preceding it had been radical, infidel, and metaphysical; it is a "Schellingism," which at first endeavours to preserve as many of the philosophic conclusions of the preceding century as possible, but which, ever more obstinate and ever more narrow-minded, hastens towards the opposite extreme from that which had proved fatal to the preceding period. The confusedly fantastic side of Romanticism is represented by Southey with his Oriental narrative poems; and as for the passionate, despairing heroes of Chateaubriand and Romanticism generally, we find them, more passionate and more manly, in the works of Byron; whilst Shelley's spiritualism and dissolution of all solid form into ethereal music recalls the ardour and vagueness of Novalis. [1] This "oppression" was what today would be called "cultural imperialism". It should be remembered that the Danish kings were also German dukes (of Schleswig and Holstein) and very properly patronised German artists. In Denmark proper there was after 1800 a reaction against the German influence. Also Brandes is bitter because of the German annexation of the Danish part of Schleswig in 1864, but that happened half a century later and Denmark was not exactly an innocent victim.--Transcriber's note. II NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS