Romance, again, as far as romance depends for her effects on desperate deeds, on the rhetoric of noble brigands, on the phantasms of the sheeted dead shivering down dark passages among skeletons, on clanking chains, and on distressed damsels, was as much alive in the end of the eighteenth century as at any age of literary history. Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, Mrs. Radcliffe, all following in the Gothic wake of honest Horace Walpole and his _Castle of Otranto_, were preparing the ground for Scott and Dumas. Once more the old “popular” elements so necessary to literature (which, like Antæus, regains vigor on touching mother-earth) had been wholly absent from the poetry and prose of the last reigning Stuart and of the first two Hanoverian kings of England. But, about 1770–1780, literature had returned to its archaic popular sources. Percy had made _volks-lieder_ fashionable, Fergusson and Burns had revived the rustic muse of Scotland, and Macpherson had given mankind a draught, though an adulterated draught, from the cup of the sorceries of the Celtic enchantress. In opposition to the urban self-restraint and contented complacency of the Augustan age, Rousseau had preached the pleasures of virtue, sentiment, and of a “blessed state of Nature”; young Werther had gotten him a stool to be sad upon, like Master Stephen: weeping was the mode. Rousseau, as Mr. Pater once observed in conversation, was “the grandmother of us all,” and as tearful as Mrs. Gummidge in _David Copperfield_. Meanwhile the “emancipation” born of science had set in; people thought they knew all about everything; the elder Darwin could explain the universe without a God, quite as easily as any modern Darwinian, if not so elaborately. He may not have been always correct in his theories and facts, still, there they were, and they were “emancipating.” Yet, far from being laughed out of court by the gratifying progress of science, a more mystical religion and a life more austere had come in from the preaching of Wesley, who was practically the parent of our neo-Catholicism in its varying forms. The “Oxford Movement,” with all the strange after-symptoms which it has left behind it, is directly descended from Wesley. Thus romance, sentiment, freedom and variety in poetic form, philanthropy, revolt against the past, return to and reverence for the past, scientific doubt, weariness of life, love of nature, wistful belief, relapse on the forms of the Church, and everything else which stamps the literature of the nineteenth century were alive and active in the last half of the eighteenth century. The year 1801 made no sudden break. The nineteenth century merely went on evolving the principles, revolutionary or reactionary, of the last half of the eighteenth century.