Nor must it be forgotten that there is a large amount of eighteenth century minor poetry which, whilst reflecting in the main the literary tendency of the age in its fondness for didactic verse, presented in the guise of interminably long and dull epics and epistles, yet reveals to us, if we care to make the pilgrimage through the arid stretches of Anderson’s “British Poets,” or Dodsley’s “Collection of Poets by Several Hands,” or Bell’s “Fugitive Poetry,” or similar collections, the simple, unambitious works of poets more or less unknown when they wrote and now for the most part forgotten, who, unconscious or ignorant of the accepted rules and regulations of their time, wrote because they felt they must, and thus had no care to fetter themselves with the bondage of the “classical” diction.[258] Their range was limited, but they were able to express their thoughts and fancies, their little idylls and landscapes in plain English without any trimmings, akin in its unaffected diction and simplicity of syntax to the language of the genuine old ballads, which were so largely and, for the most part, ineffectively, if not ludicrously, imitated throughout the eighteenth century. The Augustan age, then, was not without honour, even in poetry, where, looking back after Romanticism had won and consolidated its greatest triumphs, it would seem everything had gone wrong, there was not a little from which the rebels themselves might well have profited. Nowadays we are accustomed, perhaps too often, to think of the Romantic forerunners, the poet of “The Seasons,” and Gray, and Collins, and Goldsmith, and the rest, as lonely isolated outposts in hostile territory. So they were to a large extent, but they could not, of course, altogether escape the form and pressure of their age; and what we now admire in them, and for which we salute them as the heralds of the Romantic dawn, is that which shows them struggling to set themselves free from the “classical” toils, and striving to give expression to the new ideas and ideals that were ultimately to surge and sing themselves to victory. It is scarcely necessary to recall many a well-known passage, in which, within a decade of the death of Pope, or even before the mid-century, these new ideas and ideals had found expression in language which really sounded the death-knell of the old diction. Fine sounds, Keats within a few decades was to proclaim exultantly, were then to be heard “floating wild about the earth,” but already as early as Collins and Gray, and even now and then in “The Seasons,” words of infinite appeal and suggestiveness were stealing back into English poetry.