ABSTRACT
Most of the definitions of 'classical' have been used, on some occasion, for the 'romantic'. Most of the definitions of 'romanticism', with some few notorious exceptions, have been used for classicism. Romanticism differs for each European country, and the value of the term, and of the literature that can be applied to it, has varied at different periods even within a single national culture. 'Romantic' signified the quality found in fiction or in a 'romance', and since the romances usually contained far-fetched and improbable incidents, romantic came to mean something far-fetched and opposed to fact. In England, 'romantic' gradually approached literature through its application to scenes and buildings. William Wordsworth thinks of 'romantic' in its early eighteenth-century sense of something extravagant and excessive, even undesirable. The value of the term during the so-called 'Romantic Revival' is best illustrated by John Foster's essay, On the Application of the Epithet Romantic, first published in 1805.
