The year before the appearance of the “Reliques,” Thomas Chatterton had published his “Rowley Poems,” and this attempt of a poet of genius to pass off his poems as the work of a mediaeval English writer is another striking indication of the new Romantic spirit then asserting itself. As for the pseudo-archaic language in which Chatterton with great labour clothed his “revivals,” there is no need to say much. It was a thoroughly artificial language, compiled, as Skeat has shown, from various sources, such as John Kersey’s “Dictionarium Anglo-Brittanicum,” three editions of which had appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his contemporaries, marked “O,” and in some cases erroneously explained. This dictionary was the chief source of Chatterton’s vocabulary, many words of which the young poet took apparently without any definite idea of their meaning.[155] Yet in the Rowley poems there are passages where the pseudo-archaic language is quite in keeping with the poet’s theme and treatment, whilst here and there we come across epithets and lines which, even in their strange dress, are of a wild and artless sweetness, such as Where thou mayst here the sweete night-lark chant, Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide, or the whole of the first stanza of the famous “An Excelente Balade of Charitie,” where the old words help to transport us at once into the fictitious world which Chatterton had made for himself. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the “Rowley dialect” was not, as we nowadays, with Skeat’s analysis in our minds, are a little too apt to believe, a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather reflected an attempt to escape from the dead abstract diction of the period.[156] Apart from this special aspect of the Romantic revival marked by a tendency to look back lovingly to the earlier English poetry, there are few traces of the use of archaic and obsolete words, at least of such words used consciously, in eighteenth century poetry. The great poets of the century make little or no use of them. Collins has no examples, but Gray, who began by advocating the poet’s right to use obsolete words, and later seemed to recant, now and then uses an old term, as when in his translation from Dante he writes: The anguish that unuttered _nathless_ wrings My inmost heart. Blake, however, it is interesting to note, often used archaic forms, or at least archaic spellings,[157] as _Tyger_, _antient_ (“To the Muses”), “the _desart_ wild” (“The Little Girl Lost”), as well as such lines as In lucent words my darkling verses dight (“Imitation of Spenser”) or So I piped with merry _chear_. (Introduction to “Songs of Innocence”)