The immortal stories were then part and parcel of a sort of poetical curriculum through which the whole school must be taken by the stern masters Tradition and Propriety. There is little to be wondered at, if this matter of curriculum was treated by the more passive scholars as a matter of course, and by the sharper and less reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion of their real meaning.

When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his Wife of Bath's Tale, he makes, not Midas's minister, but his queen, tell the mighty secret--and thus secures another hit at woman's loquacity.

Prior's Female Phaeton is a younger sister, who, jealous of her elder's success, thus pleads with her 'mamma':

I'll have my earl as well as she Or know the reason why.

And she wants to flaunt it accordingly.

Finally,

Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way; Kitty, at heart's desire, Obtained the chariot for a day, And set the world on fire.

Pandora, in Parnell's Hesiod or the Rise of Woman, is only a

'shining vengeance... A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill'

sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.

The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere miniatures for the decoration of his Fan.

Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an Ode to Apollo, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:

Patron of all those luckless brains, That to the wrong side leaning Indite much metre with much pains And little or no meaning...

Even in Gray's--'Pindaric Gray's'--treatment of classical themes, there is a sort of pervading ennui, or the forced appreciativeness of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse- making tools. The 'Aegean deep', and 'Delphi's steep', and 'Meander's amber waves', and the 'rosy-crowned Loves', are too cursorily summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for their own sweet sakes.

It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world: they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the learning and taste of a literary 'coterie'.

The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday language. Thus, when Garrick, in his verses _Upon a Lady's Embroidery_, mentions 'Arachne', it is obvious that he does not expect the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva's art, or the Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when Falconer, in his early Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales, expresses a rhetorical wish

'to aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs,'

that particular son of Astraeus, whose love for the nymph Orithyia was long unsuccessful, because he could not 'sigh', is surely far from the poet's mind; and 'to swell the wind', or 'the gale', would have served his turn quite as well, though less 'elegantly'.

Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced opinion when he praised and damned, in one breath, 'the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism.' [Footnote: Essay on the Study of Literature, Section 56.] No wonder if in his days, and for a long time after, the passionate giants of the Ages of Fable had dwindled down to the pretty puppets with which the daughters of the gentry had to while away many a school hour.

But the days of this rhetorical--or satirical, didactic--or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the foam of perilous seas' in the West, but also on

the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From ancient melody had ceased. [Footnote: Blake, Poetical Sketches, 1783.]

Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs of a more impassioned worship.

The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier--the last, indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries--had long rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to the plaintive invocation of Blake to the Ancient Muses.

The first generation of English Romantics either shunned the subject altogether, or simply echoed Blake's isolated lines in isolated passages as regretful and almost as despondent. From Persia to Paraguay Southey could wander and seek after exotic themes; his days could be 'passed among the dead'--but neither the classic lands nor the classic heroes ever seem to have detained him. Walter Scott's 'sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather', as Ruskin says; [Footnote: Modern Painters, iii. 317] and when he came to Rome, his last illness prevented him from any attempt he might have wished to make to enlarge his field of vision. Wordsworth was even less far-travelled, and his home-made poetry never thought of the 'Pagan' and his 'creed outworn', but as a distinct pis-aller in the way of inspiration. [Footnote: Sonnet 'The world is too much with us'; cf. The Excursion, iv. 851-57.] And again, though Coleridge has a few magnificent lines about them, he seems to have even less willingly than Wordsworth hearkened after

The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion. [Footnote: The Piccolomini, II, iv.]

It was to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a considerable change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self- concentration, England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way to Europe--and vice versa. And from our point of view this widening of prospects is especially noticeable. For the classical revival in Romanticism appears to be closely connected with it.

It is an alluring subject to investigate. How the progress of scholarship, the recent 'finds' of archaeology, the extension of travelling along Mediterranean shores, the political enthusiasms evoked by the stirrings of young Italy and young Greece, all combined to reawaken in the poetical imagination of the times the dormant memories of antiquity has not yet been told by the historians of literature.