Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 157 



towards the close of the 18th century. Wishing to give the 

 highest possible praise to a brilliant work published in 1804, 

 Napoleon could find no more superlative epithet than Vraiment 

 Ossianique. Goethe admired this shadowy, unsubstantial Ossian. 

 His influence upon Chateaubriand was very powerful. Learned 

 critics contrasted the author of Fingal with the author of the 

 Odyssey, and drew up a merit list which might have read — 1st and 

 gold medal, Ossian; honourable mention. Homer. The forgeries 

 were pretentious, bombastic, unconvincing, but they came at the 

 psychological moment. They offered to lead Europe but of the 

 literary land of Egypt, away from the faultily faultless, icily 

 regular dead perfection of. the 18th century House of Literary 

 Bondage. 



These fragments of Ancient poetry came to us, says Gosse, 

 tinged with moonlight and melancholy, exempt from all attention 

 to the strained rules and laws of composition; they are dimly 

 primitive and pathetically vague, full of all kinds of plaintive and 

 lyrical suggestiveness. Let me read you a few lines by way of 

 illustration : — 



Ossian, p. 93 (Homer, 102, 103), 157, 163, 223. 

 I said a few minutes ago that Chatterton is hailed by some of 

 our ablest critics as the Father of the Second Romantic 

 Movement. Yet how young he was ! From the day of his birth 

 to the day when he was found in a London attic with a few bits 

 of arsenic between his teeth covered a span of less than 18 years. 

 We sometimes talk of the early death of Keats, of Shelley, of 

 Byron, of Burns, and we speculate on the what-might-have-beens 

 had these men lived to the green old age of a Wordsworth, or a 

 Browning, or a Tennyson. But of Chatterton, perishing in the 

 pride of his mid-teens, and leaving such a legacy of accomplished 

 work and enduring influence it is idle to speculate : he is a literary 

 puzzle, a problem in criticism for all time. I know nothing more 

 striking in our literature than the manner in which he breaks away 

 from the poetry of his age both in form and choice of subject. In 

 him the high temper of romance lived intensely. We note in 

 hnn a determination almost desperate to escape from the conven- 

 tional present by appealing to the past— to the past of the brave 

 days, for example, when Odin and Thor were yet gods, and the 

 Danes were thundering on our coast. In his pages we are 



