of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry,
except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose.
Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone
that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms
and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or
invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this
way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred
years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In
truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal beauties; and he has
no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those
other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture."
He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me
the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they
appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly
degenerated."

Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction
of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton
imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the
reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he
says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational,
deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and
enchantment," and he quotes, _a propos_ of this the famous stanza about
the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of
the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of
our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and
incantations. These _Gothic_ charms are in truth more striking to the
imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and
Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and
Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously
poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan
(i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight,
the priest himself dared not approach it--

"'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.'

"Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the
Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great
staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and
Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do w