The pedantic and cumbrous terms, which swarm in the majority of the Miltonic imitations, were artificial creations, rarely imbued with any trace of poetic power. Where they do not actually arise from deliberate attempts to imitate the high Miltonic manner, they probably owe their appearance to more or less conscious efforts to make the new blank verse as attractive as possible to a generation of readers accustomed to the polished smoothness of the couplet. Though such terms linger on until the time of Cowper, and even invade the works of Wordsworth himself, romanticism utterly rejected them, not only because of a prejudice in favour of “Saxon simplicity,” but also because such artificial formations lacked almost completely that mysterious power of suggestion and association in which lies the poetical appeal of words. Wordsworth, it is true, could win from them real poetic effects, and so occasionally could Thomson, but in the main they are even more dead and dreary than the old abstract diction of the neo-classicals. The tendency towards archaism was much more successful in this respect, because it was based on a firmer foundation. In harking back to “the poet’s poet,” the eighteenth century versifiers were at least on a right track, and though it was hardly possible, even with the best of them, that more than a faint simulacrum of the music and melody of the “Faerie Queene” could be captured merely by drawing drafts on Spenser’s diction, yet they at least helped to blaze a way for the great men who were to come later. The old unknown writers of the ballads and Spenser and the Elizabethans generally were to be looked upon as treasure trove to which Keats and Scott and Beddoes and many another were constantly to turn in their efforts to revivify the language of poetry, to restore to it what it had lost of freshness and vigour and colour.