When we review the “theory” of poetical language in the eighteenth century, as revealed in the sayings, direct and indirect, of poets and critics, we feel that there is little freshness or originality in the views expressed, very little to suggest the changes that were going on underneath, and which were soon to find their first great and reasoned expression. Nominally, it would seem that the views of the eighteenth century “classicists” were adequately represented and summed up in those of Johnson, for whom the ideal of poetical language was that which Dryden had “invented,” and of which Pope had made such splendid use in his translation of Homer. In reality, the practice of the “neo-classical” poets was largely influenced by the critical tenets of the school to which they belonged, especially by that pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine according to which poetry was to be an “imitation” of the best models, whilst its words, phrases, and similes were to be such as were generally accepted and consecrated by poetic use. It was this conventionalism, reinforced by, as well as reflecting, the neo-classical outlook on external nature, that resulted in the “poetic diction” which Wordsworth attacked, and it is important to note that a similar stereotyped language is to be found in most of the contemporary poetry of Western Europe, and especially in that of France.[52] We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that neither Johnson, nor any of his “classical” contemporaries, appears to attach any importance to the fact that Pope in his essays and epistles had set up a standard of diction, of which it is not too much to say that it was an ideal vehicle of expression for the thoughts and feelings it had to convey. So enamoured were they of the pomp and glitter of the “Homer” that they apparently failed to see in this real “Pope style” an admirable model for all writers aiming at lucidity, simplicity, and directness of thought. We may see this clearly by means of an instructive comparison of Johnson’s judgments on the two “Pope styles.” “It is remarked by Watts,” he writes, “that there is scarcely a happy combination of words or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language which Pope has not inserted into his version of Homer.”[53] On the other hand, he is perhaps more than unjust to Pope’s plain didactic style when he speaks of the “harshness of diction,” the “levity without elegance” of the “Essay on Man.”[54]