The accepted theory which assumed that the forms of poetry had been settled in the past and existed to be applied, though it concerned itself mainly with the ancient writers, included also two moderns in its scope.  You were orthodox if you wrote tragedy and epic as Horace told you and satire as he had shown you; you were also orthodox if you wrote in the styles of Spenser or Milton.  Spenser, though his predecessors were counted barbaric and his followers tortured and obscure, never fell out of admiration; indeed in every age of English poetry after him the greatest poet in it is always to be found copying him or expressing their love for him—­Milton declaring to Dryden that Spenser was his “original,” Pope reading and praising him, Keats writing his earliest work in close imitation.  His characteristic style and stanza were recognised by the classic school as a distinct “kind” of poetry which might be used where the theme fitted instead of the heroic manner, and Spenserian imitations abound.  Sometimes they are serious; sometimes, like Shenstone’s Schoolmistress, they are mocking and another illustration of the dangerous ease with which a conscious and sustained effort to write in a fixed and acquired style runs to seed in burlesque.  Milton’s fame never passed through the period of obscurity that sometimes has been imagined for him.  He had the discerning admiration of Dryden and others before his death.  But to Addison belongs the credit of introducing him to the writers of this time; his papers in the Spectator on Paradise Lost, with their eulogy of its author’s sublimity, spurred the interest of the poets among his readers.  From Milton the eighteenth century got the chief and most ponderous part of its poetic diction, high-sounding periphrases and borrowings from Latin used without the gravity and sincerity and fullness of thought of the master who brought them in.  When they wrote blank verse, the classic poets wrote it in the Milton manner.

The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of one man, James Thomson.  For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality with patriots as the author of “Rule, Britannia,” Thomson wrote two poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former The Castle of Indolence, the latter The Seasons.  The Spenserian manner is caught very effectively, but the adoption of the style of Paradise Lost, with its allusiveness, circumlocution and weight, removes any freshness the Seasons might have had, had the circumstances in them been put down as they were observed.  As it is, hardly anything is directly named; birds are always the “feathered tribe” and everything else has a similar polite generality for its title.  Thomson was a simple-minded man, with a faculty for watching and enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted diction.  It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged to read her in translations.