of this influence.[119] Hence it need not be at all surprising to find that it has invaded poetry. The use of latinized words and phrases gave, or was supposed to give, an air of culture to verse, and contemporary readers did not always, we may suppose, regard such language as a mere display of pedantry. In this, as in other respects of the poetic output of the period, we may see a further reflex of the general literary atmosphere of the first half or so of the eighteenth century. There was no poetry of the highest rank, and not a great deal of _poetical_ poetry; the bulk of the output is “poetry without an atmosphere.” The very qualities most admired in prose—lucidity, correctness, absence of “enthusiasm”—were such as were approved for poetry; even the Romantic forerunners, with perhaps the single exception of Blake, felt the pressure of the prosaic atmosphere of their times. No doubt had a poet of the highest order appeared he would have swept away much of the accumulated rubbish and fashioned for himself a new poetic language, as Thomson tried, and Wordsworth later thought to do. But he did not appear, and the vast majority of the practitioners were content to ring the changes on the material they found at hand, and were not likely to dream of anything different. It is thus not sufficient to say that the “rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption,” to borrow an appropriate description from Lowell, was due solely to the potent influence of Milton. It reflects also the average conception of poetry held throughout a good part of the eighteenth century, a conception which led writers to seek in mere words qualities which are to be found in them only when they are the reflex of profound thought or powerful emotion. In short, latinism in eighteenth century poetry may be regarded as a literary fashion, akin in nature to the stock epithets and phrases of the “descriptive” poetry, which were later to be unsparingly condemned as the typical eighteenth century poetical diction.