And this leads us to a consideration of the poetic diction of the eighteenth century from a more general standpoint. For no discussion of poetical language can be complete unless an attempt is made to consider the question in its entirety with a view to the question of what really constitutes poetic diction, what it is that gives to words and phrases, used by certain poets in certain contexts, a magic force and meaning. The history of poetic diction from the very beginning of English literature down to present times has yet to be written, and it would be a formidable task. Perhaps a syndicate of acknowledged poets would be the only fit tribunal to pass judgment on so vital an aspect of the craft, but even then we suspect there would be a good deal of dissension, and probably more than one minority report. But the general aspects of the question have formed a fruitful field of discussion since Wordsworth launched his theories[259] and thus began a controversy as to the exact nature of poetic language, the echoes of which, it would seem, have not yet died away. For the Prefaces were, it may be truly said, the first great and definite declaration of principle concerning a question which has been well described as “the central one in the philosophy of literature, What is, or rather what is not, poetic diction?”[260] Judged from this wider standpoint, the diction of the “classical” poetry of the eighteenth century, and even of a large portion of the verse that announces the ultimate Romantic triumph, seems to have marked limitations. The widespread poverty and sterility of this diction was not, of course, merely the result of an inability to draw inspiration from Nature, or of a failure to realize the imaginative possibilities of words and phrases: it was, it would almost seem, the inevitable outcome and reflex of an age that, despite great and varied achievements, now appears to us narrow and restricted in many vital aspects. If poetry is a criticism of life, in the sense in which Matthew Arnold doubtless meant his dictum to be taken, the age of Pope and his successors is not “poetic”; in many respects it is a petty and tawdry age—the age of the coffee-house and the new press, of the club and the coterie. There are great thinkers like Hume, great historians like Gibbon, great teachers and reformers like John Wesley; but these names and a few others seem only to throw into stronger light the fact that it was on its average level an age of talk rather than of thought, of “fickle fancy” rather than of imaginative flights, of society as a unit highly organized for the pursuit of its own pastimes, pleasures, and preoccupations, in which poetry, and literature generally, played a social part. Poetry seems to skim gracefully over the surface of life, lightly touching many things in its flight, but never soaring; philosophy and science and satire all come within its purview, but when the eternally recurring themes of