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.