Wordsworth, in launching his famous declaration of principle on the language fit and proper for metrical composition, had no doubt especially in mind the practice of his eighteenth century predecessors. But it has to be remembered that the _Prefaces_ deal in reality with the whole genesis of “what is usually called poetic diction,” and that the avowed aim and object was to sweep away “a large portion of phrases and figures of speech, which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of poets.” The circumstances of the time, and perhaps the examples chosen by Wordsworth to illustrate his thesis, have too often led to his attack being considered as concerned almost entirely with the poetical language of the eighteenth century. Hence, whenever the phrase “poetic diction” is mentioned as a term of English literary history, more often than not it is to the eighteenth century that the attention is directed, and the phrase itself has taken on a derogatory tinge, expressive of a stereotyped language, imitative, mechanical, lifeless. For in the reaction against eighteenth century styles, and especially against the polished heroic couplet, there arose a tendency to make the diction of the period an object of undistinguishing depreciation, to class it all in one category, as a collection of conventional words and phrases of which all poets and versifiers felt themselves at liberty to make use. An actual analysis of eighteenth century poetry shows us that this criticism is both deficient and misleading; it is misleading because it neglects to take any account of that eighteenth century poetical language which Pope, inheriting it from Dryden, brought to perfection, and which was so admirable a vehicle for the satiric or didactic thought it had to convey; it is deficient in that it concentrates attention mainly on one type or variety of the language, used both by poets and poetasters, and persists in labelling this type either as the “eighteenth century style proper,” or, as if the phrases were synonymous, “the Pope style.”