But there was another,
earlier and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth century, weary of
its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for
picturesqueness and relief. Romance of course, had not been dead in all
these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the
fashionable temper for writing. There was a strong romantic tradition in
the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the
writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was
in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the
journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he
said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It
is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with
either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either
of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in
what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight. As was
natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their
resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two
differed. None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to
conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to
shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to
comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds.
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