The second type of personification found in eighteenth century verse needs but brief mention here. It is the detailed personification where a full-length portrait is attempted. Like the mere abstraction it, too, is a survival of mediaeval allegory, and it is also most often a merely mechanical literary process, reflecting no real image in the poet’s mind. It is not found to any large extent, and in a certain measure owes its presence to the renewed interest in Spenser. The Spenserian imitations themselves are comparatively free from this type, a sort of negative indication of the part played by the revival in the new Romantic movement. The third type is perhaps best described as the embryonic personification. It consists in the attributing of an individual and living existence to the visible forms and invisible powers of nature, a disposition, deeply implanted in the human mind from the very dawn of existence, which has left in the mythologies and creeds of the world a permanent impress of its power. In eighteenth century literature this type received its first true expression in the work of Thompson and Collins, whilst its progress, until it becomes merged and fused in the pantheism of Wordsworth and Shelley, may be taken as a measure of the advance of the Romantic movement in one of its most vital aspects. Regarded on its purely formal side, that is, as part and parcel of the _language_ of poetry, the use of personification may then be naturally linked up with the generally literary development of the period. In the “classical” verse proper the figure employed is, as it were, a mere word and no more; it is the reflex of precisely as much individual imagination as the stock phrases of descriptive verse, _the flowery meads_, _painted birds_, and so on. There was no writing with the inner eye on the object, and the abstraction as a result was a mere rhetorical label, corresponding to no real vision of things. The broad line of advance in this, as in other aspects of eighteenth century literature, passes through the work of those who are now looked upon as the forerunners of the Romantic revolt. The frigid abstraction, a mere word distinguished by a capital letter, is to be found in “The Seasons,” but alongside there is also an approach to definite pictorial representation of the object personified. In the odes of Collins the advent of the pictorial image is definitely and triumphantly announced, and though the mechanical abstractions linger on even until the new poetry has well established itself, they are only to be found in the work of those who either, like Johnson and Crabbe, belong definitely as regards style to the old order, or like Goldsmith and, to a less extent, Cowper, reflect as it were sort of half-way attitude towards the old and the new.