Before passing to a consideration of the work of Johnson and Goldsmith, who best represent the later eighteenth century development of the “classical” school of Pope, reference may be made to two other writers. The first of these is Thomas Chatterton. In that phase of the early Romantic Movement which took the form of attempts to revive the past, Chatterton of course played an important part, and the pseudo-archaic language which he fabricated for the purpose of his “Rowley” poems is interesting, not only as an indication of the trend of the times towards the poetic use of old and obsolete words, but also as reflecting, it would seem, a genuine endeavour to escape from the fetters of the conventional and stereotyped diction of his day. On the other hand, in his avowedly original work, Chatterton’s diction is almost entirely imitative. He has scarcely a single fresh image or description; his series of “Elegies” and “Epistles” are clothed in the current poetic language. He uses the stock expressions, _purling streams_, _watery bed_, _verdant vesture of the smiling fields_, along with the usual periphrases, such as _the muddy nation_ or _the speckled folk_ for “frogs.” One verse of an “Elegy” written in 1768 contains in itself nearly all the conventional images: Ye variegated children of the Spring, Ye blossoms blushing with the pearly dew; Ye birds that sweetly in the hawthorn sing; Ye flowery meads, lawns of verdant hue. It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly “original” work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds, which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval “discoveries,”[76] even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something fresh and new. A poet of much less genius, but one who enjoyed great contemporary fame, was William Falconer, whose “Shipwreck,” published in 1762, was the most popular sea-poem of the eighteenth century. The most striking characteristic of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea-terms, but apart from this the language is purely conventional. The sea is still the same _desert-waste_, _faithless deep_, _watery way_, _world_, _plain_, _path_, or _the fluid plain_, _the glassy plain_, whilst the landscape catalogue is as lifeless as any of the descriptive passages of the early eighteenth century: on every spray The warbling birds exalt their evening lay, Blithe skipping o’er yon hill the fleecy train Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain.