If most studies of Romanticism have tended to underplay the degree to which it rested on a particular appropriation of the Bible, almost none has noted that this is even more true of Romantic aesthetic theory than it is of particular works of literature. Yet, as I hope these chapters may suggest, we cannot begin to understand the way in which the Romantics actually use the Bible in poetry, drama and fiction (not to mention painting) without appreciating the degree to which particular applications rest (consciously or unconsciously) on more general theoretical assumptions. Moreover, few, if any, of these assumptions would have seemed obvious to writers of previous generations. As we have seen, the idea of the Bible as presenting a novel-like narrative, with character, motivation and plot, is, like the modern novel itself, no older than the eighteenth century. If those who created the Authorised Version in the early seventeenth century also read their world in terms of the Bible, their normative book reflected a very different world of typological correspondences and polysemous meanings. Similarly, the growing use of the Bible as a metatype was not unconnected with the new idea that expression was inseparable from theory, and which sought to create a universal whole out of many diverse fragments whose incompleteness was necessary and essential rather than accidental and contingent.