During all that time no one, so far as I can discover, has evinced the smallest interest in Catharine Trotter. We gain an idea of the blackness of her obscurity when we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to have never heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke, the correspondent of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar, she seems to have slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on time. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still hovering in a phantom-like transparence round the recognised seats of learning, will be a little comforted at last by the polite attention of a few of my readers.
[Footnote 2: Around the story of Agnes de Castro there gathered a whole literature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has investigated in his _Works of Aphra Behn_, Vol. V. pp. 211-212.]
[Footnote 3: Printed in Otto Klopp's _Correspondance de Leibnitz avec l'Electrice Sophie_. Hanover, 1875.]
The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined so closely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literature is ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and popular among the best readers in their day.
There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are apt to neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic pleasure experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, at any epoch of history. We are far too much in the habit of supposing that what we--that is the most instructed and sensitive of us--admire now must always have been admired by people of a like condition. This has been one of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people as illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing generations as if it were not only heretical, but despicable as well. Young men to-day speak of those who fifty years ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson as though they were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked, neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly analogous to themselves that those portions of Tennyson were adored which the young repudiate to-day. Not to expand too largely this question of the oscillation of taste--which, however, demands more careful examination than it has hitherto received--it is always important to discover what was honestly admired at a given date by the most enthusiastic and intelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. But to do this we must cultivate a little of that catholicity of heart which perceives technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an earlier date, and not merely where the current generation finds it.