Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow.
(P.L. III, 26-30)
But the minor poets of the eighteenth century, who, by their mechanical imitations, succeeded in reducing Milton’s diction to the level of an almost meaningless jargon, had had every encouragement from their greater predecessors and contemporaries. The process of depreciation may be seen already in Dryden, and it is probably by way of Pope that much of the Miltonic language became part of the eighteenth century poetic stock-in-trade. Pope was a frequent borrower from Milton, and, in his “Homer” especially, very many reminiscences are to be found, often used in an artificial, and sometimes in an absurd, manner.[71] Moreover, Pope’s free and cheapened use of many of Milton’s descriptive epithets did much to reduce them to the rank of merely conventional terms, and in this respect the attack of Wordsworth and Coleridge was not without justice. But on the whole the proper conclusion would seem to be that what is usually labelled as “the Pope style” could with more justice and aptness be described as “the pseudo-Miltonic style.” It is true that the versifiers freely pilfered the “Homer,” and the vogue of much of the stock diction is thus due to that source, but so far as Pope himself is concerned there is justice in his plea that he left this style behind him when he emerged from “Fancy’s maze” and “moralized his song.”
To what extent this catalogue of lifeless words and phrases had established itself as the poetical thesaurus is to be seen in the persistency with which it maintained its position until the very end of the century, when Erasmus Darwin with a fatal certainty evolved from it all its worst features, and thus did much unconsciously to crush it out of existence. James Thomson is rightly regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the Romantic Revolt, and he has had merited praise for his attempts to provide himself with a new language of his own. In this respect, however, he had been anticipated by John Philips, whose “Splendid Shilling” appeared in 1705, followed by “Cyder” a year later. Philips, though not the first Miltonic imitator, was practically the first to introduce the Miltonic diction and phrases, whilst at the same time he acquired the knack of adding phrases of his own to the common stock. He was thus an innovator from whom Thomson himself learned not a little.
But though the “Seasons” is ample testimony to a new and growing alertness to natural scenery, Thomson found it hard to escape from the fetters of the current poetic language. We feel that he is at least trying to write with his eye steadily fixed upon the object, but he could perhaps hardly be expected to get things right from the very beginning. Thus a stanza from his “Pastoral Entertainment” is purely conventional: