In the year of Dryden’s death (or perhaps in the following year) there had appeared the “Art of Poetry” by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth century. During the forty years of Dryden’s literary career the supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first prosodist to formulate the “rules” of the couplet, and in doing so he succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic tendencies of the time, in “codifying and mummifying” a system which soon became erected into a creed. “The foregoing rules (_of accent on the even places and pause mainly at the 4th, 5th, or 6th syllable_) ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables: and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them harshness and discord.”[64] Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their vehicle of expression. Since the “Lives of the Poets” it has been customary to regard this “poetic diction” as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief largely due to Johnson’s eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice of his contemporaries. But others—Gray amongst them—did not view their innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope’s influence, he says in effect, after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in which it was clothed. Pope had made poetry a mere mechanic art And every warbler had his tune by heart; and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer.[65] Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the “poetical diction,” against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.