or Ambrose Philips: Hark: how they warble in the brambly bush The gaudy goldfinch or the speckly thrush (“Fourth Pastoral”) and that “Epistle to a Friend,” in which he ridicules the very jargon so much used in his own Pastorals.[67] Pope then may justly be judged “not guilty,” at least “in the first degree,” of having originated the poetic diction which Johnson praised and Wordsworth condemned; in using it, he was simply using the stock language for descriptive poetry, whether original or in translations, which had slowly come into being during the last decade of the seventeenth century. If it be traced to its origins, it will be found that most of it originated with that poet who may fairly be called the founder of the English “classical” school of poetry—to Milton, to whom in large measure is due, not merely the invention, but also, by the very potency of the influence exercised by his great works, its vogue in the eighteenth century. Before the time of Milton, it is not too much to say, even when we remember the practice of Spenser and Donne and their followers, that there was no special language for poetry, little or nothing of the diction consecrated solely to the purposes of poets. The poets of the Elizabethan age and their immediate successors had access to all diction, upon which they freely drew. But it seems natural, indeed inevitable, that for Milton, resolved to sing of things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” the ordinary language of contemporary prose or poetry should be found lacking. He was thus impelled, we may say, consciously and deliberately to form for himself a special poetical vocabulary, which, in his case, was abundantly justified, because it was so essentially fitted to his purpose, and bore the stamp of his lofty poetic genius. This poetical vocabulary was made up of diverse elements. Besides the numerous “classical” words, which brought with them all the added charm of literary reminiscence, there were archaisms, and words of Latin origin, as well as words deliberately coined on Latin and Greek roots. But it included also most of the epithets of which the eighteenth century versifiers were so fond. Examples may be taken from any of the descriptive portions of the “Paradise Lost”: On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers (IV, 334) or About me round I saw Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, And liquid lapse of murmuring streams. (VIII, 260-263)