The Romantic Revival in English poetry is generally accepted as having Blake and Gray and Collins for its pioneers. It must, however, be remembered that the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the age of reason, had not been wholly without the Romantic note. To read the work of the almost forgotten smaller men of that time is to chance often upon a phrase in which the tenderness, and heart-ache, and the warm sense of colour and natural beauty, which were so to dominate the great epoch from Wordsworth to Keats, break through the witty and balanced argument of an age when it was not considered to be the thing to say too much about the heart. Even the master, Pope himself, in some of his pastorals and elegies, and in such a poem as _Eloisa to Abelard_, sometimes lets the glow of passion play upon a poetic habit that was not used to have its cold and logical brilliance ruffled except by anger. In those days, however, the Romantic note when it was struck seems rather to have been struck by accident than by deliberation, while in Gray and Collins there is continually an instinct for it, in conflict with an inherited tradition that gives it no encouragement. Blake, although he definitely helped the Romantic Revival on its way, was himself, like Landor, rather an isolated manifestation of poetry belonging not very clearly to any particular age. The Romantic Revival, when it did come, came with a full force of reaction against the age of reason, with its often admirable rhetoric, its emotional timidity and its concern with etiquette at the expense of character. But the Romantic Revival, for all the splendour of its common spirit and the great personal genius of its masters, had one radical condition of weakness, namely, that it was a revival. In many ways it was, and remains, the richest period in English poetry, but it was also the first period in English poetry that had something in the inspiration of its actual poetic method that was second-hand and not original. This is not to say that Wordsworth and the others were not original poets. The discovery of nature, the revolutionary passion, the preoccupation with the everyday life of the emotions, one or another of these marked Keats and Shelley and Byron, and the rest of them, as discoverers. But in the actual machinery through which their poetic mood worked there was often something literary and remembered in a sense more marked than can be observed in the practice of poets in England before. It is true that no good poet has ever worked without some example in his mind, but the Elizabethans were conscious of an Italian influence as of something vivid and present among them, a very part of their own lives, as it were, whereas the Elizabethan influence upon Keats was something deliberately remembered, something won back from a long past age. Without in the least detracting from the achievement of Keats, which must remain among the greatest in English poetry, it may be said that