his breath
A nitrous damp that strikes petrific death.
One short stanza by William Shenstone, from his poem “Written in Spring, 1743,” contains an obvious example in three out of its four lines:
Again the labouring hind inverts the soil,
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave,
Another spring renews the soldier’s toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave.
But it is in the blank verse poems that the fashion is most prevalent, and it is there that it only too often becomes ludicrous. The blind Milton, dying, lonely and neglected, a stranger in a strange land, is hardly likely to have looked upon himself as the founder of a “school,” or to have suspected to what base uses his lofty diction and style were to be put, within a few decades of his death, by a swarm of poetasters who fondly regarded themselves as his disciples.[118] The early writers of blank verse, such as John Philips, frankly avowed themselves imitators of Milton, and there can be little doubt that in their efforts to catch something of the dignity and majesty of their model the crowd of versifiers who then appeared on the scene had recourse to high-sounding words and phrases, as well as to latinized constructions by which they hoped to elevate their style. The grand style of “Paradise Lost” was bound to suffer severely at the hands of imitators, and there can be little doubt but that much of the preposterous latinizing of the time is to be traced to this cause. At the same time the influence of the general literary tendencies of the Augustan ages is not to be ignored in this connexion. When a diction freely sprinkled with latinized terms is found used by writers like Thomson in the first quarter, and Cowper at the end of the century, it may perhaps also be regarded as a mannerism of style due in some degree to influences which were still powerful enough to affect literary workmanship. For it must be remembered that in the eighteenth century the traditional supremacy of Latin had not yet altogether died out: pulpit and forensic eloquence, as well as the great prose works of the period, still bore abundant traces of the persistency of this influence.[119] Hence it need not be at all surprising to find that it has invaded poetry. The use of latinized words and phrases gave, or was supposed to give, an air of culture to verse, and contemporary readers did not always, we may suppose, regard such language as a mere display of pedantry.
In this, as in other respects of the poetic output of the period, we may see a further reflex of the general literary atmosphere of the first half or so of the eighteenth century. There was no poetry of the highest rank, and not a great deal of poetical poetry; the bulk of the output is “poetry without an atmosphere.” The very qualities most admired in prose—lucidity, correctness, absence of “enthusiasm”—were such as were approved for poetry; even the Romantic forerunners, with perhaps the single exception of Blake, felt the pressure of the prosaic atmosphere of their times. No doubt had a poet of the highest order appeared he would have swept away much of the accumulated rubbish and fashioned for himself a new poetic language, as Thomson tried, and Wordsworth later thought to do. But he did not appear, and the vast majority of the practitioners were content to ring the changes on the material they found at hand, and were not likely to dream of anything different.
It is thus not sufficient to say that the “rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption,” to borrow an appropriate description from Lowell, was due solely to the potent influence of Milton. It reflects also the average conception of poetry held throughout a good part of the eighteenth century, a conception which led writers to seek in mere words qualities which are to be found in them only when they are the reflex of profound thought or powerful emotion. In short, latinism in eighteenth century poetry may be regarded as a literary fashion, akin in nature to the stock epithets and phrases of the “descriptive” poetry, which were later to be unsparingly condemned as the typical eighteenth century poetical diction.