“From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
    Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept;
    Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread,
    Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . . 
    Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
    And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33]

Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science, Melancholy, Night.  Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a goddess,

    “Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34]

But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style.  It enabled him to speak of a woman as a “nymph,” or a “fair”; of sheep as “the fleecy care”; of fishes as “the scaly tribe”; and of a picket fence as a “spiculated paling.”  Lowell says of Pope’s followers:  “As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common.  This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis.  They called everything something else.  A boot with them was

    “‘The shining leather that encased the limb.’

“Coffee became

    “‘The fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown.’"[35]

“For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects,” says Mr. Gosse,[36] “they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions.  They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora’s vernal wreath.  It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression was, ‘Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!’ Women became nymphs in this new phraseology, fruits became ‘the treasures of Pomona,’ a horse became ‘the impatient courser.’  The result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature.  Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures of Pomona.  This decline from particular to general language was regarded as a great gain in elegance.  It was supposed that to use one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language, brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity.  It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word ‘caterpillars,’ whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as ’the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain.’. . .  In the generation that succeeded Pope really clever writers spoke of a ‘gelid cistern,’ when they meant a cold bath, and ‘the loud hunter-crew’ when they meant a pack of foxhounds.”