Other phrases, like “vernal bloom,” “lucid stream,” “starry sphere,” “flowery vale,” “umbrageous grots,” were to become the worn-out penny-pieces of the eighteenth century poetical mint. Milton indeed seems to have been one of the great inventors of adjectives ending in y, though in this respect he had been anticipated by Browne and others, and especially by Chapman, who has large numbers of them, and whose predilection for this method of making adjectives out of nouns amounts almost to an obsession.[68] Milton was also perhaps the great innovator with another kind of epithet, which called forth the censure of Johnson, who described it as “the practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the terminations of participles,” though the great dictator is here attacking a perfectly legitimate device freely used by the Jacobeans and by most of the poets since their time.[69] Nor are there wanting in Milton’s epic instances of the idle periphrases banned by Wordsworth: _straw-built citadel_ for “bee-hive,” _vernal bloom_ for “spring flowers,” _smutty grain_ for “gunpowder,” _humid train_ for the flowery waters of a river, etc.[70] With Milton, then, may be said to have originated the “poetic diction,” which drew forth Wordsworth’s strictures, and which in the sequel proved a dangerous model for the swarm of versifiers who essayed to borrow or imitate it for the purpose of their dull and commonplace themes. How much the Miltonic language, as aped and imitated by the “landscape gardeners and travelling pedlars” of the eighteenth century, lost in originality and freshness, may be felt, rather than described, if we compare so well-known a passage as the following with any of the quotations given earlier: Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow. (P.L. III, 26-30)