The stock poetic diction may serve also to illustrate the indebtedness of the English classical poets to their Latin masters in the matter of phraseology. Compare, for instance, the use of the word “cavus” in its application to “montes,” “cavernae,” “trunci,” “saxa,” “umbra,” and “flumina,” and the English word, “hollow,” as applied to caves, rocks, mountains, shores, valleys, and even to the dark. Or compare the Latin use of “horridus,” meaning rough, rugged, wild, with “horrid,” in its application to mountains, rocks, and thickets. “Savage mountains” and “shaggy mountains” sound like an echo from Virgil’s “montes feri” and “intonsi montes.” The fundamental conception is certainly the same. Milton’s “hairy thickets” and bushes with “frizzled hair” and Dryden’s “hairy honours of the vine” are suggestive of the Latin use of “comae” as a trope for foliage. The word “honours,” as applied to foliage or fruits, is also of Latin origin. The “tristis” or “dura hiems” of Virgil finds its echo in the general epithets applied to winter in English poetry. “Deform’d” and “inverted” seem to be mere Latin transcripts. Dryden was fond of the word “nodding.” He used it twice in translations in places where some other word would more accurately represent the original.[176] In its application to mountains the word may, perhaps, be traced to Virgil’s “nutantem mundum.” Its further use by Dryden, Pope, Akenside, Shenstone, and others, with reference to forests, rocks, and precipices, is apparently a later outgrowth from its application to mountains. “Sylvan Muse” and “silvestris musa;” “flowery plains” and “florea rura;” “liquid fountains” and “liquidi fontes;” “mossy springs” and “muscosi fontes,” are but a few of the many exact parallels between the English and Latin phrases descriptive of scenery. So, too, the superficial conception of the various beauties of Nature as “adornments” of the earth finds its prototype in such expressions as “lucidum caeli decus,” applied to the moon, or “pulla ficus, ornat arborem,” or “vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut vitibus uvae.” An instructive example of the way in which borrowed epithets lose their significance and become merely conventional is the word “painted” in its application to birds. In Virgil “pictaeque volucrae”[177] meant birds of many colors, or of bright colors. Milton uses the phrase “painted wings,”[178] referring apparently to brilliant birds in the Garden of Eden. But by Pope’s time the word “painted” had become a stock epithet with its connotation so vaguely widened that it would be difficult to give its exact meaning. It was simply indefinitely associated with birds, hence Pope applied it to the brown wings of a pheasant.[179] Shenstone uses it of the wings of a fly,[180] and Parnell applies it to the eye of a peacock,[181] and Waller to the peacock’s nest.[182] In the same way “painted,” in its application to flowers, might easily be a picturesque descriptive adjective for