There is still freer use of latinisms in the “Homer”:[116] _her eyes caerulean_, _the point innocuous_, _piercing accents stridulous_, _the triturated barley_, _candent lightnings_, _the inherent barb_, _his stream vortiginous_, besides such passages as nor did the Muses spare to add Responsive melody of vocal sweets. The instances given above fully illustrate on the whole the use of a latinized diction in eighteenth century poetry.[117] It must not, however, be supposed that the fashion was altogether confined to the blank verse poems. Thus Matthew Prior in “Alma,” or “The Progress of the Mind,” has passages like the word obscene Or harsh which once elanced must ever fly Irrevocable, whilst Richard Savage in his “Wanderer” indulges in such flights as his breath A nitrous damp that strikes petrific death. One short stanza by William Shenstone, from his poem “Written in Spring, 1743,” contains an obvious example in three out of its four lines: Again the labouring hind inverts the soil, Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave, Another spring renews the soldier’s toil, And finds me vacant in the rural cave. But it is in the blank verse poems that the fashion is most prevalent, and it is there that it only too often becomes ludicrous. The blind Milton, dying, lonely and neglected, a stranger in a strange land, is hardly likely to have looked upon himself as the founder of a “school,” or to have suspected to what base uses his lofty diction and style were to be put, within a few decades of his death, by a swarm of poetasters who fondly regarded themselves as his disciples.[118] The early writers of blank verse, such as John Philips, frankly avowed themselves imitators of Milton, and there can be little doubt that in their efforts to catch something of the dignity and majesty of their model the crowd of versifiers who then appeared on the scene had recourse to high-sounding words and phrases, as well as to latinized constructions by which they hoped to elevate their style. The grand style of “Paradise Lost” was bound to suffer severely at the hands of imitators, and there can be little doubt but that much of the preposterous latinizing of the time is to be traced to this cause. At the same time the influence of the general literary tendencies of the Augustan ages is not to be ignored in this connexion. When a diction freely sprinkled with latinized terms is found used by writers like Thomson in the first quarter, and Cowper at the end of the century, it may perhaps also be regarded as a mannerism of style due in some degree to influences which were still powerful enough to affect literary workmanship. For it must be remembered that in the eighteenth century the traditional supremacy of Latin had not yet altogether died out: pulpit and forensic eloquence, as well as the great prose works of the period, still bore abundant traces of the persistency