Each vicious ferment.
About the same time Edward Young was probably writing his “Night Thoughts,” though the poem was not published until 1742. Here again the influence of Thomson is to be seen in the diction, though no doubt in this case there is also not a little that derives direct from Milton. Young has Latin formations like terraqueous, to defecate, feculence, manumit, as well as terms such as avocation, eliminate, and unparadize, used in their original sense. In the second instalment of the “Night Thoughts” there is a striking increase in the number of Latin terms, either borrowed directly, or at least formed on classical roots, some of which must have been unintelligible to many readers. Thus indagators for “seekers,” fucus for “false brilliance,” concertion for “intimate agreement,” and cutaneous for “external,” “skin deep”:
All the distinctions of this little life
Are quite cutaneous.[111]
It is difficult to understand the use of such terms when simple native words were ready at hand, and the explanation must be that they were thought to add to the dignity of the poem, and to give it a flavour of scholarship; for the same blemishes appear in most of the works published at this time. Thus in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1744) there is a similar use of latinized terms: pensile planets, passion’s fierce illapse, magnific praise, though the tendency is best illustrated in such passages as
that trickling shower
Piercing through every crystalline convex
Of clustering dewdrops to their flight opposed,
Recoil at length where, concave all behind
The internal surface of each glassy orb