whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear, sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in “The Fleece” (Bk. III):
The scatter’d mists reveal the dusky hills;
Grey dawn appears; the golden morn ascends,
And paints the glittering rocks and purple woods.
Nor must we forget “Grongar Hill,” which has justly received high praise for its beauties and felicities of description.
It is scarcely necessary to illustrate further the vogue of this sort of diction in the first half of the eighteenth century; it is to be found everywhere in the poetry of the period, and the conventional epithets and phrases quoted from Dyer and Thomson may be taken as typical of the majority of their contemporaries. But this lifeless, stereotyped language has also invaded the work of some of the best poets of the century, including not only the later classicists, but also those who have been “born free,” and are foremost among the Romantic rebels. The poetic language of William Collins shows a strange mixture of the old style and the new. That it was new and individual is well seen from Johnson’s condemnation, for Johnson recognized very clearly that the language of the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” did not conform to what was probably his own view that the only language fit and proper for poetry was such as might bear comparison with the polish and elegance of Pope’s “Homer.” It is not difficult to make due allowance for Johnson when he speaks of Collins’s diction as “harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudicially selected”; we deplore the classical bias, and are content enough to recognize and enjoy for ourselves the matchless beauty and charm of Collins’s diction at its best. Yet much of the language of his earlier work betrays him as more or less a poetaster of the eighteenth century. The early “Oriental Eclogues” abound in the usual descriptive details, just as if the poet had picked out his words and phrases from the approved lists. Thus,
Yet midst the blaze of courts she fixed her love
On the cool fountain or the shady grove
Still, with the shepherd’s innocence her mind
To the sweet vale and flowery mead inclined;