The most formidable rival of the heroic couplet in the eighteenth century was blank verse, the advent of which marked the beginning of the Romantic reaction in form. Here Thomson may be regarded as the chief representative, and it is significant that the large number of compound epithets in his work are terms of natural description, which, in addition to their being a reflex of the revived attitude to natural scenery, were probably more or less consciously used to compensate readers for the absence of “the rhyme-stroke and flash” they were accustomed to look for in the contemporary couplet. “He utilizes periodically,” to quote Saintsbury again,[194] “the exacter nature-painting, which in general poetic history is his glory, by putting the distinctive words for colour and shape in notable places of the verse, so as to give it character and quality.” These “distinctive words for colour and shape” were, with Thomson, for the most part, compound epithets; almost by the time of “Yardley Oak,” and certainly by the time of “Tintern Abbey,” blank verse had been fully restored to its kingdom, and no longer needed such aid. CHAPTER VII PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY In the Preface of 1798, when Wordsworth formulated his theories with regard to poetical language, the first “mechanical device of style” against which he directed his preliminary attack was the use of “personifications of abstract ideas.”[195] Such personifications, he urged, do not make any natural or regular part of “the very language of men,” and as he wished “to keep the reader in the company of flesh and blood,” he had endeavoured “utterly to reject them.” He was ready to admit that they were occasionally “prompted by passion,” but his predecessors had come to regard them as a sort of family language, upon which they had every right to draw. In short, in Wordsworth’s opinion, abstractions and personifications had become a conventional method of ornamenting verse, akin to the “vicious diction,” from the tyranny of which he wished to emancipate poetry. The specific point on which he thus challenged the practice of his predecessors could hardly be gainsaid, for he had indicted a literary device, or artifice, which was not only worked to death by the mere poetasters of the period, but which disfigures not a little the work of even the great poets of the century.