As has been said, the crowd of poetasters who attempted to reproduce Spenser’s spirit and style thought to do so by merely mechanical imitation of what they regarded as his “quaint” or “ludicrous” diction. Between them and any possibility of grasping the perennial beauty and charm of the “poet’s poet” there was a great gulf fixed, whilst, altogether apart from this fatal limitation, then parodies were little likely to have even ephemeral success, for parody presupposes in its readers at least a little knowledge and appreciation of the thing parodied. But there were amongst the imitators one or two at least who, we may imagine, were able to find in the melody and romance of “The Faerie Queene” an avenue of escape from the prosaic pressure of their times. In the case of William Thompson, Shenstone, and the author of the “Castle of Indolence,” the influence of Spenser revealed itself as in integral and vital part of the Romantic reaction, for these, being real poets, had been able to recapture something at least of the colour, music, and fragrance of their original. And not only did these, helped by others whose names have all but been forgotten restore a noble stanza form to English verse. Even their mechanical imitation of Spenser’s language was not without its influence, for it cannot be doubted that these attempts to write in an archaic or pseudo-archaic style did not a little to free poetry from the shackles of a conventional language. This process was greatly helped by that other aspect of the eighteenth century revival of the past which was exemplified in the publication of numerous collections of old ballads and songs.[149] There is, of course, as Macaulay long ago noted, a series of conventional epithets that is one mark of the genuine ballad manner, but the true ballad language was not a lifeless stereotyped diction. It consisted of “plain English without any trimmings.” The ballads had certain popular mannerisms (_the good greenwood_, _the wan water_, etc.), but they were free from the conventional figures of speech, or such rhetorical artifices as personification and periphrasis. Hence it is not surprising that at first their fresh and spontaneous language was regarded, when contrasted with the artificial and refined diction of the time, as “barbarous” or “rude.” Thus Prior thought it necessary to paraphrase the old ballad of the “Nut Brown Maid” into his insipid “Henry and Emma” (1718), but a comparison of only a few lines of the original with the banality of the modernized version is sufficient testimony to the refreshing and vivifying influence of such collections as the “Reliques.”