without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of

these figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more

frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural

connexion whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially

from the real language of men in any situation. The Reader or Hearer of this distorted

language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the

genuine language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also: in

both cases he was willing that his common judgement and understanding should be laid

asleep, and he had no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject

the false; the one served as a passport for the other. The emotion was in both cases

delightful, and no wonder ifhe confounded the one with the other, and believed them both

to be produced by the same, or similar causes. Besides, the Poet spake to him in the

character of a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and from a

variety of other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration; and Poets, it

is probable, who had before contented themselves for the most part with misapplying only

expressions which at first had been dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still further,

and introduced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the original figurative

language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention, and characterized by various

degrees of wanton deviation from good sense and nature.

It is indeed true, that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to differ materially from

ordinary language, because it was the language of extraordinary occasions; but it was

really spoken by men, language which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been

affected by the events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those around

him. to this language it is probable that metre of some sort or other was early superadded.

This separated the genuine language of Poetry still further from common life, so that

whoever read or heard the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in

which he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes manifestly

different from those which acted upon him in real life. This was the great temptation to all

the corruptions which have followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets

constructed a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common with the genuine

language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in ordinary conversation; that it was

unusual. But the first Poets, as I have said, spake a language which, though unusual, was

still the language of men. This circumstance, however, was disregarded by their

successors; they found that they could please by easier means: they became proud of

modes of expression which they themselves had invented, and which were uttered only by

themselves. In process of time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual

language, and whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he possessed more

or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this adulterated phraseology into

his compositions, and the true and the false were inseparately interwoven until, the taste

of men becoming gradually perverted, this language was received as a natural language:

and at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree really become

so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress

of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the

plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics,

and enigmas.

3