Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/493

 Reviews and Notes 489 doctrine of Plotinus, that had reached its climax in this form, after a strange progress down the ages, carried by reformers and those cast out and despised by orthodox religion. In this century of upheavals religion passed into its enthusiastic stage. By its opponents the name enthusiasm was applied to it and enthusiast became a term of opprobrium. Thus three separate yet interacting movements appear, all on a basis of mysticism or a belief in the oneness of the universe. The enthusiasts were widely and wildly interested in mystical writers and alchemy, reflecting in a popular form the interest of the two types of learned men discussed above. The century teemed with enthusiasm, but not for an institution that might limit in any way individual self-expression or development; it was so desirous of knowing the laws of the world at hand that it had no impulse to study that world's literary past. Toward the close of this chapter Dr. Steeves notes (p. 58), as a confirmation of the firm establishment of the society idea, the "Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge." This is evidently a confusing of the two early religious societies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded by Thomas Bray in 1698 to provide the clergy with libraries, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the first protestant missionary society, a division separated off from the first society in 1701. Dr. Steeves' authority, publishing in 1704, was perhaps too near the events to be sure of the facts. The eighteenth century (Chapter IV) saw the real begin- nings of an impetus toward co-operative work on literary records on the part of historical scholarship from the incentive supplied in the person of the devoted and disinterested scholar Franz Junius, whose learning and personality had concentrated about himself much of the activity in Anglo-Saxon studies in the middle years of the seventeenth century. This activity expressed itself in various attempts at organization from 1707 onward. Finally the Society of Antiquaries was chartered in 1751 with Archaelogia as its publication. Smaller societies of limited membership and local interests fostered the gradual growth of a general appreciation of old literature and were also the outcome of such appreciation. More noteworthy for this period, however, is the spread of a new literary taste. This was particularly marked in "the decade following 1760, partly through the rapid weakening of the classi- cal tradition, but more particularly through the publication of three collections of ostensibly ancient poetry, Macpherson's Ossian in 1760, Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, and Chatterton's Rowley Poems from 1764 to 1770" (p. 96). The popularity of these collections Dr. Steeves explains on the score that they were not really actual monuments of antiquity but poetical remain and even fabrications gener-