Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight
On parchment scraps y-fed and Wormius hight—
(Bk. III, ll. 185-8)
an attack which is augmented by the ironic comment passed by “Scriblerus” in a footnote.[39] Nevertheless, when engaged on his translation of Homer he had an inclination, like Cowper, towards a certain amount of archaism, though it is evident that he is not altogether satisfied on the point.[40]
In Gray’s well-known letter to West, mentioned above, there is given a selection of epithets from Dryden, which he notes as instances of archaic words preserved in poetry. Gray, as we know, had a keen sense of the value of words, and his list is therefore of special importance, for it appears to show that words like mood, smouldering, beverage, array, wayward, boon, foiled, etc., seemed to readers of 1742 much more old-fashioned than they do to us. Thirty years or so later he practically retracts the views expressed in this earlier letter, in which he had admirably defended the use in poetry of words obsolete in the current language of the day. “I think,” he wrote to James Beattie, criticizing “The Minstrel,”[41] “that we should wholly adopt the language of Spenser or wholly renounce it.” And he goes on to object to such words as fared, meed, sheen, etc., objections which were answered by Beattie, who showed that all the words had the sanction of such illustrious predecessors as Milton and Pope, and who added that “the poetical style in every nation abounds in old words”—exactly what Gray had written in his letter of 1742.
Johnson, it need hardly be said, was of Pope’s opinion on this matter, and the emphatic protest which he, alarmed by such tendencies in the direction of Romanticism, apparent not only in the Spenserian imitations, but still more in such signs of the times as were to culminate in Percy’s “Reliques,” the Ossianic “simplicities” of Macpherson, and the Rowley “forgeries,” is evidence of the strength which the Spenserian revival had by then gained. “To imitate Spenser’s fiction and sentiments can incur no reproach,” he wrote: “but I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction and his stanza.”[42] To the end he continued to express his disapproval of those who favoured the “obsolete style,” and, like Pope, he finally indulges in a metrical fling at the innovators:
Phrase that time has flung away
Uncouth words in disarray;
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and Elegy and Sonnet.[43]