The movement towards purity and simplicity of expression received its first definite statement in Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society, 1667.” One section of the History contains an account of the French Academy, and Sprat’s efforts were directed towards the formation of a similar body in England as an arbiter in matters of language and style. The ideal was to be the expression of “so many _things_ almost in an equal number of _words_.”[3] A Committee of the Royal Society, which included Dryden, Evelyn, and Sprat amongst its members, had already met in 1664, to discuss ways and means of “improving the English tongue,” and it was the discussions of this committee which had doubtless led up to Evelyn’s letter to Sir Peter Wyche, its chairman, in June 1665.[4] Evelyn there gives in detail his ideas of what an English academy, acting as arbiter in matters of vocabulary and style, might do towards purifying the language. Twenty-three years later Joseph Glanvill defined the new ideal briefly in a passage of his “Essay Concerning Preaching”: “Plainness is a character of great latitude and stands in opposition, First to _hard words_: Secondly, to _deep and mysterious notions_: Thirdly, to _affected Rhetorications_: and Fourthly, to _Phantastical Phrases_.”[5] In short, the ideal to be aimed at was the precise and definite language of experimental science, but the trend of the times tended to make it more and more that ideal of poetry also which was later to be summed up in Dryden’s definition of “wit” as a “propriety of thoughts and words.”[6] It is of some little interest perhaps to note that it is not until the end of the seventeenth century that the word _diction_ definitely takes on the sense which it now usually bears as a term of literary criticism. In the preface to “Sylvae, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies” (1685), Dryden even seems to regard the term as not completely naturalized.[7] Moreover, the critics and poets of the eighteenth century were for the most part quite convinced that the special language of poetry had begun with Dryden. Johnson asserted this in his usual dogmatic fashion, and thus emphasized the doctrine, afterwards vigorously opposed by Wordsworth, that between the language of prose, and that proper to poetry, there is a sharp distinction. “There was therefore before the time of Dryden no poetical diction.... Those happy combinations of words which distinguished poetry from prose had been rarely attempted; we had few elegancies or flowers of speech.”[8] Gray moreover, while agreeing that English poetry had now a language of its own, declared in a letter to West that this special language was the creation of a long succession of English writers themselves, and especially of Shakespeare and Milton, to whom (he asserts) Pope and Dryden were greatly indebted.[9]