bright blossoms of any sort, but being gradually more and more closely associated with flowers, it would lose its first meaning and come to be applied to white lilies as well as tulips. “Purple” is another borrowed word. It brought with it its whole train of Latin meanings. In ordinary English speech “purple” had a fairly definite reference to a specific color composed of red and blue, but in the English classical poetry it was used in exactly the Latin sense. The fundamental idea of “purpureus” was color, but a secondary meaning was brightness; in its twofold application it was a descriptive epithet applicable to light,[183] to flowers in general, to roses, spring, or morning. The English phrases, “morning’s purple wings,” “the purple day,” “the purple east,” “the purpled air,” “ground empurpled with roses,” “the purple spring,” “purple daffodils,” are such as would serve the purpose of a modern impressionist painter, but in eighteenth-century poetry they chiefly indicate a knowledge of the classics. They were clearly imitative phrases. In individual cases the charge of imitation is a hazardous one to make because so difficult to prove. However close the parallelism, it is always possible to believe that two persons thought of the same thing independently. Where a whole literary period is under consideration as here, all that can be said is that the similarities between the English and the Latin forms of expression are numerous and striking, that the phrases are frequently such as would not naturally occur to an English poet, that the English poets had little first-hand knowledge of Nature, and that they knew their Virgil and Horace by heart. But after all, the inner conviction of imitation with which one turns from a consecutive reading of the two literatures is a more legitimate proof, perhaps, than even a liberal assemblage of debatable specific cases. The imitation is not confined to diction. Many of the favorite similes, especially those drawn from trees, bees, leaves in autumn, the oak and vine, angry seas, and streams, have a Latin cast. They seem to be worked out on Virgilian models, and it is impossible not to feel that the English poet owed more to his classical library than to his knowledge of Nature. One striking mark of imitation is the prevalence of the artificial cumulative simile so common in Virgil.