Shone pendent.
There is still less in the poems of Thomas Warton, who was even a more direct follower of Milton than his elder brother. There is scarcely one example of a Latinism in “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” which is really a companion piece to “The Enthusiast.” The truth is that it was Milton’s early work—and especially “Il Penseroso”—that affected most deeply these early Romanticists, and even their blank verse is charged with the sentiments and phrases of Milton’s octosyllabics. Thus the two poets, who were among the first to catch something of the true spirit of Milton, have little or nothing of the cumbersome and pedantic diction found so frequently in the so-called “Miltonics” of the eighteenth century, and this in itself is one indication of their importance in the earlier stages of the Romantic revival.
This is also true in the case of Collins and Gray, who are the real eighteenth century disciples of Milton. Collins’s fondness for personified abstractions may perhaps be attributed to Milton’s influence, but there are few, if any, traces of latinism in his pure and simple diction. Gray was probably influenced more than he himself thought by Milton, and like Milton he made for himself a special poetical language, which owes not a little to the works of his great exemplar. But Gray’s keen sense of the poetical value of words, and his laborious precision and exactness in their use, kept him from any indulgence in coinages. Only one or two latinisms are to be found in the whole of his work, and when these do occur they are such as would come naturally to a scholar, or as were still current in the language of his time. Thus in “The Progress of Poesy” he has
this pencil take,
where “pencil” stands for “brush” (Latin, pensillum); whilst in a translation from Statius he gives to prevent its latinized meaning
the champions, trembling at the sight
Prevent disgrace.
There is also a solitary example in the “Elegy” in the line
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust.
The contemporary fondness for blank verse had called forth the strictures of Goldsmith in his “Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning,” and his own smooth and flowing couplets have certainly none of the pompous epithets which he there condemns. His diction, if we except an occasional use of the stock descriptive epithets, is admirable alike in its simplicity and directness, and the two following lines from “The Traveller” are, with one exception,[113] the only examples of latinisms to be found in his poems: