decasyllabic verse the desired “correctness” and “smoothness.” But it is unjust to saddle him with the responsibility for the lack of originality evident in many of his successors and imitators. The fact that this stock language is not confined to the neo-classical poets proper, but is found to a large extent persisting to the very end of the eighteenth century, and even invading the early work of the writer who led the revolt against it, is indicative of another general cause of its widespread prevalence. Briefly, it may be said that not only did the conventional poetic diction reflect in the main the average neo-classical outlook on external nature; it reflected also the average eighteenth century view as to the nature of poetical language, which regarded its words and phrases as satisfying the artistic canon, not in virtue of the degree in which they reflected the individual thought or emotion of the poet, but according as they conformed to a standard of language based on accepted models. CHAPTER IV LATINISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY There is now to be noticed another type of eighteenth century poetic diction which was in its way as prevalent, and, it may be added, as vicious, as the stock diction which has been discussed in the previous chapter. This was the use of a latinized vocabulary, from the early years of the century down to the days when the work of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Crabbe seemed to indicate a sort of interregnum between the old order and the new. This fashion, or craze, for “latinity” was not of course a sudden and special development which came in with the eighteenth century: it was rather the culmination of a tendency which was not altogether unconnected with the historic development of the language itself. As a factor in literary composition, it had first begun to be discussed when the Elizabethan critics and men of letters were busying themselves with the special problem of diction. Latinism was one of the excesses to which poets and critics alike directed their attention, and their strictures and warnings were such as were inevitable and salutary in the then transitional confusion of the language.[90] In the early years of the seventeenth century this device for strengthening and ornamenting the language was adopted more or less deliberately by such poets as Phineas and Giles Fletcher, especially the latter, who makes free use of such coinages as _elamping_, _appetence_, _elonging_, etc.[91]