themes where neologisms and rare words would not offend as they would in lyric verse. The poets of gloom, such as Young and Blair, were in some ways very moral in their tendency, and they too (considering how small their group) contributed very significantly to the vocabulary of poetry.

We may further remark that of the important men, Gray, Crabbe, and Blake kept closest to the existing vocabulary and to the accepted senses of words.

APPENDIX III

The Adjective "Romantic".

a. The adjective "romantic" before the earliest example of the word as used by the Romantic poets of the 18th. Century:

The earliest example given by the New English Dictionary has the sense of 'having' the quality of romance' as used by H. More in 1659; it was so used by Boyle in 1665 and by Hearne in 1709.

In the Sixteen-sixties, we find several instances of the adjective used 'fictitious', 'unfounded in fact', 'imaginary' numerous writers have since given it this meaning.

More relevant to the Romantic movement are the following examples :-In Pepys' Diary for 13th June 1666, the word (spelt romantique') signified 'having an imaginative appeal'; in 1700, Rowe, in "The Ambitious Step-Mother", employs the epithet as 'having a tendency towards romance'; and in "Italy', 1705, Addison writes: "It is so Romantic a Scene, that it has always probably given occasion to such Chimerical Relations".

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b. A note on the early employment of this epithet in literary criticism :

We may here remark that probably the first use of the adjective as applied to a poem was made (perhaps by David Rae) in an unsigned article inserted in the "Edinburgh Magazine" of April 1761 and entitled "The Monthly Reviewers Reviewed, in their character of Mr. Hamilton of Bangour's Poems", wherein the writer says: "The Braes of Yarrow' is finely romantic, and happily falls into the melancholy sweetness, and picturesque wildness, peculiar to the ancient Scottish songs". There the adjective bears already the significance given to it by those who speak of "Romantic literature". (The N.E.D. 'doesn't contain this instance, which, for the meaning and appli

cation in question, comes years before anything there mentioned.) Another useful instance is this: in 1789, the editor of Russell's "Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems" spoke, in a footnote, of Sophocles' "Philoctetes" as "that romantic and interesting tragedy".

c. The adjective "romantic" in 18th-century new-movement poetry.

Lady Winchelsea does not use the word, nor does Pope in the "Elegy" and "Eloisa". Parnell and Ramsay offer no instances; nor do the famous ballads of Tickell, Mallet, and Lady Wardlaw.

But Thomson in "Summer" (1727) has the passage:

Thrice happy he! who on the sunless side
Of a romantic mountain, forest-crowned,
Beneath the whole collected shade reclines;

while in "Autunm" (1730), we find "romantic wish" and "romantic view", his contemporary, Dyer, does not employ this epithet; nor does Glover in the poem "On Sir Isaac Newton" or in "Admiral Hosier's Ghost". Thomson, then, was the earliest relevant poet to use it.

Somerville in "The Chase" has nothing to offer. Shenstone in the "Progress of Taste" writes:

and :

How happy once was Damon's lot,
While yet romantic schemes were not;

Romantic scenes of pendent hills.

In "Night Thoughts" (1742-4) Young uses this adjective on three occasions; "Night Seventh". v.568, and "N. Eighth”, vv. 1068 and 1187; in the sense of "far-fetched, extravagant, excessively fanciful". But "The Grave" presents no example of this epithet.

Akenside in "The Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) has "romantic scene" (11.660); in "The Remonstrance of Shakespeare", wr. 1749, "Tragedy's r. arts; and in "To Sleep" "r. thoughts". Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health” (1744) contains "romantic groves" (III.80); and his "Benevolence" (1751), "each sweet r. scene".

Collins offers only one instance--"Don's romantic springs" in the "Superstitions" Ode; Gray and Hamilton of Bangour offer none at all.

Joseph Warton has 'Yon hills' romantic side", in "Verses Written at Montauban..., 1750", but his brother Thomas employs the adjective at least six times in his verse and always in the sense of either "unconventionally beautiful" or "dealing with Romances" - In the "Ode sent to Mr. Upton", "romantic Spenser's moral page"; in the "Ode on the Approach of Summer", "some more r. scene might please"; in "The Grave of King Arthur", "old r. lore"; in the sonnet beginning "While Summer's suns", "r. steep"; in "Sir Joshua Reynold's Painted Window" (1782), "hues romantic"; and in the "Ode for His Majesty's Birthday, June 4th, 1790", "r. Matlock".

Grainger in his "Ode to Solitude" (1755) has "O Solitude, romantic maid".

Falconer in "The Shipwreck" uses the word once :

Where light with gay romantic error strayed;

Smart in the "Song to David" doesn't use it at all.

[Percy in the note introductory to Book I of Series III of "The Reliques" employs the phrase "romantic subjects”; but there the adjective means "such as we find in the old Romances".]

Cunningham in "Poems, chiefly Pastoral" (1766) and later verse provides no instance.

Jago, Ross, Goldsmith in "The Deserted Village", and Fergusson make no use of this word in their verse, but Mickle has "a wyld, r. dell" in "The Concubine", 1767, and in “Almada Hill", 1781, "r. days" and "r. hills".

Byrom has no recourse to this epithet.

In

Beattie's employment of "romantic" is noteworthy. "The Minstrel" we come on four instances In Book I,

:

stanza 58,

Meanwhile, whate'er or beautiful or new,
Sublime, or dreadful, in earth, sea, or sky,
By chance or search, was offer'd to his view,
He scann'd with curious and romantic eye;

257

in Book II, stanza 3:

Each vale romantic, tuneful every tongue,
Sweet, wild, and artless all...;

in Book II. st. 9, to Edwin, "soothed by the lulling sound of grove and stream", appear "romantic visions"; and in Book II. st. 30, we hear of "the gay dreams of fond romantic youth” ; while in "Elegy” we find' "r. dale".

Chatterton does not use the word in the "Rowley Poems": in supposedly-Mediaeval poems it would have been out of place. Scott in "Amwell" (1776) has "romantic forms" : while "Conclusion", in the 1782 volume of his verse, offers "wild, romantic thought".

Logan, in the "Ode on the Death of a Young Lady” (1781), says: "Friendship is romantic held".

Crabbe offers only one instance in his 18th century work, "romantic scenes" in "The Choice", 1780. Burns in a footnote to "Halloween" describes the Downans as "certain little romantic, rocky, green hills", but in his verse we find only one instance: "Thro' many a wild romantic grove"; while Cowper never uses this adjective in his poems.

Thomas Russell has, in the piece "To Vaclusa", "thy gro ve's romantic gloom", and, in "To Cervantes", "romantic Fancy"; and Bowles (in the same year, 1789) offers:

On the Coomb's romantic side

Was heard the distant cuckoo's hollow bill.

Wordsworth employs in "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) the phrase "romantic dreams", while in his 1796 "Poems" Coleridge says in "Religious Musings" (written 1794) "some arched romantic rock", and in "To a Young Friend” (1796):

There uprears

That shadowing Pine its old romantic limbs.

Lamb does not use this epithet in his pre-1798 verse; nor does Joanna Baillie; but Rogers in the "Pleasures of Memory", 1792, has the lines:

And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems
With golden visions, and romantic dreams;