Gradually: to Sidney, poetry was still, after Aristotle’s definition, “an art of imitation”; only poets must “to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range ... into the divine consideration of what may be and should be”. And during the seventeenth century all art continued to be regarded as imitation, of which, however, there were two kinds—the imitation of other arts and the imitation of Nature herself. The second kind, by analogy from picture-dealing, was called _original_, and the faculty which achieved it was named _invention_ (Latin, ‘invenire’, ‘to find’), a word implying that something had been found in Nature which had not _yet_ been imitated by man. Early in the eighteenth century the substantive _originality_ was formed from _original_, and an increasing importance began to be attached to the element of novelty in experiences of all kinds, Addison placing it on a level with greatness and beauty as a source of pleasure to the imagination. At the same time another word appeared in the vocabulary of aesthetic criticism. An Elizabethan critic had already pointed out that, if poets could indeed spin their poetry entirely out of themselves they were as “_creating_ gods”, and Dryden soon used the same verb of Shakespeare, because, in Caliban, he had _invented_ “a person not in Nature”. So also Addison: ... this Talent of affecting the Imagination ... has something in it like Creation: It bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to the Reader’s View several Objects which are not to be found in Being. It makes Additions to Nature, and gives greater Variety to God’s Works. This word, too, with its derivative _creative_, is used far too often and too lightly[72] now to allow us to easily perceive its importance. ‘Creare’ was one of those old Latin words which had been impregnated through the Septuagint and the Vulgate with Hebraic and Christian associations; its constant use in ecclesiastical Latin had saturated it with the special meaning of _creating_, in divine fashion, out of nothing, as opposed to the merely human _making_, which signified the rearrangement of matter already created, or the imitation of “creatures”. The application of such a word to human activities seems to mark a pronounced change in our attitude towards ourselves, and it is not surprising that, in the course of its career, the new use should have met with some opposition on the grounds of blasphemy.