Perhaps by these means the poet wished to give a quaint or old-fashioned look to his verses, though it is to be remembered that most of them occur in the “Poetical Sketches,” which are avowedly Elizabethan. The use of archaic and obsolete words in the eighteenth century was then chiefly an outcome of that revival of the past which was one of the characteristics of the new Romantic movement, and which was later to find its culmination in the works of Scott. The old words used by the eighteenth century imitators of Spenser were not often used, we may imagine, because poets saw in them poetical beauty and value; most often they were the result of a desire to catch, as it were, something of the “local colour” of the “Faerie Queene,” just as modern writers nowadays, poets and novelists alike, often draw upon local dialects for new means of expression. The Spenserian imitations recovered not a few words, such as _meed_, _sheen_, _dight_, _glen_,[158] which have since been regarded as belonging especially to the diction of poetry, and when the Romantic revival had burst into life the impulse, which had thus been unconsciously given, was continued by some of its great leaders. Scott, as is well known, was an enthusiastic lover of our older literature, especially the ballads, from which he gleaned many words full of a beauty and charm which won for them immediate admission into the language of poetry; at the same time he was able to find many similar words in the local dialects of the lowlands and the border. Perhaps in this work he had been inspired by his famous countryman, Robert Burns, who by his genius had raised his native language, with its stores of old and vivid words and expressions, to classical rank.[159]