But, apart from these general considerations, the question of poetic diction is rarely treated as a thing _per se_ by the writers who, after Dryden or Pope, or alongside of them, took up the question. There are no attempts, in the manner of the Elizabethans,[26] to conduct a critical inquiry into the actual present resources of the vernacular, and its possibilities as a vehicle of expression. Though the attention is more than once directed to certain special problems, on the whole the discussions are of a general nature, and centre round such points as the language suitable for an Heroic Poem, or for the “imitation” of aspects of nature, or for Descriptive Poetry, questions which had been discussed from the sixteenth century onwards, and were not exhausted by the time of Dr. Johnson.[27] Goldsmith’s remarks, reflecting as they do a sort of half-way attitude between the old order and the new, are interesting. Poetry has a language of its own; it is a species of painting with words, and hence he will not condemn Pope for “deviating in some instances from the simplicity of Homer,” whilst such phrases as _the sighing reed_, _the warbling rivulet_, _the gushing spring_, _the whispering breeze_ are approvingly quoted.[28] It is thus somewhat surprising to find that in his “Life of Parnell” he had pilloried certain “misguided innovators” to whose efforts he attributed the gradual debasing of poetical language since the happy days when Dryden, Addison, and Pope had brought it to its highest pitch of refinement.[29] These writers had forgotten that poetry is “the language of life” and that the simplest expression was the best: brief statements which, if we knew what Goldsmith meant by “life,” would seem to adumbrate the theories which Wordsworth was to expound as the Romantic doctrine.