Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift
and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We
have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as
Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend
older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen
that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with
literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In
England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton,
and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval
poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany
there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind
and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere
for this.

In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic
revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the
appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck,
Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouqué, Von Arnim, Brentano,
and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than
to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and
Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone,
Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy
Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and
Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual
nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative
importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his
life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many
buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came
too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism.
In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest