It is difficult to understand the use of such terms when simple native words were ready at hand, and the explanation must be that they were thought to add to the dignity of the poem, and to give it a flavour of scholarship; for the same blemishes appear in most of the works published at this time. Thus in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1744) there is a similar use of latinized terms: _pensile planets_, _passion’s fierce illapse_, _magnific praise_, though the tendency is best illustrated in such passages as that trickling shower Piercing through every crystalline convex Of clustering dewdrops to their flight opposed, Recoil at length where, concave all behind The internal surface of each glassy orb Repels their forward passage into air. In “The Poet” there is a striking example of what can only be the pedantic, even if playful, use of a cumbrous epithet: On shelves _pulverulent_, majestic stands His library. Similar examples are to be found in “The Art of Preserving Health” by John Armstrong, published in the same year as Akenside’s “Pleasures.” The unpoetical nature of this subject may perhaps be Armstrong’s excuse for such passages as Mournful eclipse or planets ill-combined Portend disastrous to the vital world; but this latinizing tendency was perhaps never responsible for a more absurd periphrasis than one to be found in the second part of the poem, which treats of “Diet”: Nor does his gorge the luscious bacon rue, Nor that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste Of solid milk.[112] The high Miltonic manner was likewise attempted by John Dyer in “The Fleece,” which appeared in 1757, and by James Grainger in “The Sugar Cane” (1764), to mention only the most important. Dyer, deservedly praised for his new and fresh descriptive diction, has not escaped this contagion of latinism: _the globe terraqueous_, _the cerule stream_, _rich sapinaceous loam_, _detersive bay salt_, etc., while elsewhere there are obvious efforts to recapture the Miltonic cadence. In “The Sugar Cane” the tendency is increased by the necessity thrust upon the poet to introduce numerous technical terms. Thus though all thy mills Crackling, o’erflow with a redundant juice Poor tastes the liquor; coction long demands And highest temper, ere it saccharize. Meanwhile Joseph Warton had written his one blank verse poem “The Enthusiast” (1740), when he was only eighteen years old. But though both he and his brother Thomas are among the most important of the poets who show the influence of Milton most clearly, that influence reveals itself rather in the matter of thought than of form, and there is in “The Enthusiast” little of the diction that marred so many of the blank verse poems. Only here and there may traces be seen, as in the following passage: