The imitations were not, however, exclusively from the Latin authors. Often the Latin borrowings came at second hand from other English poets, and English poets borrowed freely from each other. A single instance may be cited to show how an insipid and almost unmeaning collocation of words could hold its own and be re-echoed from poet to poet. Addison’s couplet, My humble verse demands a softer theme, A painted meadow, or a purling stream,[189] was imitated by Tickell in, By Nature fitted for an humble theme A painted prospect, or a murmuring stream,[190] and twice by Pope in, Enough to shame the gentlest bard that sings Of painted meadow and of purling springs,[191] and Like gentle Fanny’s was my flowery theme, A painted mistress or a purling stream.[192] Compare also, Most of our poets choose their early theme A flowery meadow or a purling stream.[193] But one other sort of imitation can be noticed here, and that is a natural outcome from the use of the rhymed couplet. It is what Pope calls “the sure return of still expected rhymes.” The common rhyme of “stream” and “theme” has already been noted. Pope calls attention to others: Whene’er you find the “cooling western breeze” In the next line it “whispers through the trees.” If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep” The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with “sleep.”[194] The last reference is an ungracious hit at one of Wycherley’s poems recommendatory of Pope’s “Pastorals,” but the rhyme of “breeze” and “trees” is certainly of a bewildering frequency. There is a stanza in point in one of the doubtful poems attributed to Gray: First when Pastorals I read, Purling streams and cooling breezes I only wrote of; and my head Rhimed on, reclined beneath the Tree-zes.[195] One cause of the artificial and forced effect of the classical poetry of Nature is undoubtedly the sameness of impression produced by this frequent recurrence of the same rhymes.