But—and this is sufficient for our purpose—every one knows what the Elgin Marbles have done for Keats and Shelley; and what inspirations were derived from their pilgrimages in classic lands by all the poets of this and the following generation, from Byron to Landor. Such experiences could not but react on the common conception of mythology. A knowledge of the great classical sculpture of Greece could not but invest with a new dignity and chastity the notions which so far had been nurtured on the Venus de’ Medici and the Belvedere Apollo—even Shelley lived and possibly died under their spell. And ‘returning to the nature which had inspired the ancient myths’, the Romantic poets must have felt with a keener sense ‘their exquisite vitality’.[7] The whole tenor of English Romanticism may be said to have been affected thereby. For English Romanticism—and this is one of its most distinctive merits—had no exclusiveness about it. It was too spontaneous, one would almost say, too unconscious, ever to be clannish. It grew, untrammelled by codes, uncrystallized into formulas, a living thing always, not a subject-matter for grandiloquent manifestoes and more or less dignified squabbles. It could therefore absorb and turn to account elements which seemed antagonistic to it in the more sophisticated forms it assumed in other literatures. Thus, whilst French Romanticism—in spite of what it may or may not have owed to Chénier—became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti-classical, whilst for example[8] Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending _Légende des Siècles_ could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may claim to have restored in freshness and purity the religion of antiquity. Indeed their voice was so convincing that even the great Christian chorus that broke out afresh in the Victorian era could not entirely drown it, and Elizabeth Barrett had an apologetic way of dismissing ‘the dead Pan’, and all the ‘vain false gods of Hellas’, with an acknowledgement of your beauty which confesses Some chief Beauty conquering you. This may be taken to have been the average attitude, in the forties, towards classical mythology. That twenty years before, at least in the Shelley circle, it was far less grudging, we now have definite proof.