From the time of the publication of the first Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” (1798) the poetical language of the eighteenth century, or rather of the so-called “classical” writers of the period, has been more or less under a cloud of suspicion. The condemnation which Wordsworth then passed upon it, and even the more rational and penetrating criticism which Coleridge later brought to his own analysis of the whole question of the language fit and proper for poetry, undoubtedly led in the course of the nineteenth century to a definite but uncritical tendency to disparage and underrate the entire poetic output of the period, not only of the Popian supremacy, but even of the interregnum, when the old order was slowly making way for the new. The Romantic rebels of course have nearly always received their meed of praise, but even in their case there is not seldom a suspicion of critical reservation, a sort of implied reproach that they ought to have done better than they did, and that they could and might have done so if they had reacted more violently against the poetic atmosphere of their age. In brief, what with the Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” and its successive expansions at the beginning of the century, and what, some eighty years later, with Matthew Arnold’s calm description of the eighteenth century as an “age of prose and reason,” the poetry of that period, and not only the neo-classical portion of it, fared somewhat badly. There could be no better illustration of the influence and danger of labels and tags; “poetic diction,” and “age of prose and reason” tended to become a sort of critical legend or tradition, by means of which eighteenth century verse, alike at its highest and its lowest levels, could be safely and adequately understood and explained. Nowadays we are little likely to fall into the error of assuming that any one cut and dried formula, however pregnant and apt, could adequately sum up the literary aspects and characteristics of an entire age; the contributory and essential factors are too many, and often too elusive, for the tabloid method. And now that the poetry of the first half or so of the eighteenth century is in process of rehabilitation, and more than a few of its practitioners have even been allowed access to the slopes, at least, of Parnassus, it may perhaps be useful to examine, a little more closely than has hitherto been customary, one of the critical labels which, it would almost seem, has sometimes been taken as a sort of generic description of eighteenth century verse, as if “poetic diction” was something which suddenly sprang into being when Pope translated Homer, and had never been heard of before or since.