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or that of his contemporaries, is likely to benefit thereby. Thus in the preface to "Annus Mirabilis" he boldly claims the liberty to coin words on Latin models, and to make use of technical details. In his apology for "Heroic Poetry and Poetic License" prefixed to "The State of Innocence and Fall of Man," his operatic "tagging" of "Paradise Lost," he seems to lay down distinctly the principle that poetry demands a medium of its own, distinct from that of prose, whilst towards the end of his literary career he reiterates his readiness to enrich his poetic language from any and every source, for "poetry requires ornament," and he is therefore willing to "trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language." But it is significant that at the same time he rejects the technical terms he had formerly advocated, apparently on the grounds that such terms would be unfamiliar to "men and ladies of the first quality." Dryden has thus become more "classical," in the sense that he has gone over or reverted to the school of "general" terms, which appeared to base its ideal of expression on the accepted language of cultured speakers and writers.

Toward the establishment of this principle of the pseudo-classical creed the theory and practice of Pope naturally contributed; indeed, it has been claimed that it was in large measure the result of the profound effect of the "Essay on Criticism," or at least of the current of thought which it represents, on the taste of the age. In the Essay, Pope, after duly enumerating the various "idols" of taste in poetical thought and diction, clearly states his own doctrine; as the poets' aim was the teaching of "True Wit" or "Nature," the language used must be universal and general, and neologisms must be regarded as heresies. For Pope, as for Dryden, universal and general language meant such as would appeal to the cultured society for whom he wrote, and in his practice he thus reflected the traditional attitude towards the question of language as a vehicle of literary expression. A common "poetics" drawn and formulated by the classical scholars mainly from Aristotle had established itself throughout Western Europe, and it professed to prescribe the true relation which should exist between form and matter, between the creative mind and the work of art.

The critical reaction against these traditional canons had, as we have noted, already begun, but Pope and his contemporaries are in the main supporters of the established order, in full agreement with its guiding principle that the imitation of "Nature" should be the chief aim and end of art. It is scarcely necessary to add that it was not "Nature" in the Wordsworthian sense that was thus to be "imitated"; sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to discover what was meant by the term. But for Pope and his followers we usually find it to mean man as he lives his life in this world, and the phrase to "imitate Nature" might thus have an ethical purpose, signifying the moral "improvement" of man.

It is not necessary to dwell long on this pseudo-classical confusion of the two arts, as revealed in the critical writings of Western Europe down to the very outbreak of the Romantic revolt. In English criticism, Dryden's "Parallel" was only one of many. Of the eighteenth century English critics who developed a detailed parallelism between pictorial and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, maintaining that their standards were interchangeable, the most important perhaps is Spence, whose "Polymetis" appeared in 1747, and who sums the general position of his fellow-critics on this point in the remark, "Scarce anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture." The ultimate outcome of this confusion of poetry and painting found its expression in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the theory and practice of Erasmus Darwin, whose work, "The Botanic Garden," consisted of a "second part," "The Loves of the Plants," published in 1789, two years before its inclusion with the "first part" the "Economy of Vegetation," in one volume. Darwin's theory of poetry is contained in the "Interludes" between the cantos of his poems, which take the form of dialogues between the "Poet" and a "Bookseller." In the Interlude to Canto 1 of Part II he maintains the thesis that poetry is a process of painting to the eye, and in the cantos themselves he proceeds with great zeal to show in practice how words and images should be laid on like pigments from the outside. The young Wordsworth himself, as his early poems show, was influenced by the theory and practice of Darwin, but Coleridge was not slow to detect the danger of the elaborate word-painting that might arise from the confusion of the two arts. "The poet," he wrote, "should paint to the Imagination and not to the Fancy." For Coleridge Fancy was the "Drapery" of poetic genius, Imagination was its "Soul" or its "synthetic and magical power," and he thus emphasized what may be regarded as one of the chief distinctions between the pseudo-classical, and the romantic, interpretations of the language of poetry. In its groping after the "grand style," as reflected in a deliberate avoidance of accidental and superficial "particularities," and in its insistence on generalized or abstract forms, eighteenth century poetry, or at least the "neo-classical" portion of it, reflected its inability to achieve that intensity of imaginative conception which is the supreme need of all art.

The confusion between the two arts of poetry and painting which Coleridge thus condemned did not, it is needless to say, disappear with the eighteenth century. The Romanticists themselves finally borrowed that much-abused phrase "local colour" from the technical vocabulary of the painter, and in other respects the whole question became merged in the symbolism of the nineteenth century where literature is to be seen attempting to do the work of both music and painting.

Dr. Johnson has many things to say on the subject of poetic language, including general remarks and particular judgments on special points, or on the work of the poets of whom he treated in his "Lives." As might be expected, he clings tenaciously to the accepted standards of neo-classicism, and repeats the old commonplaces which had done duty for so long, pays the usual tribute to Waller and Denham, but ascribes the actual birth of poetical diction to the practice of Dryden. What Johnson meant by "poetical diction" is clearly indicated; it was a "system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to different arts," that is, the language of poetry must shun popular and technical words, since language is "the dress of thought" and "splendid ideas lose their magnificence if they are conveyed by low and vulgar words." From this standpoint, and reinforced by his classical preference for regular rhymes, all his particular judgments of his predecessors and contemporaries were made; and when this is remembered it is easier to understand, for instance, his praise of Akenside and his criticism of Collins.

Gray, however, perhaps the most scrupulous and precise of all our poets with regard to the use of words in poetry, has some pertinent things to say on the matter. There is his important letter to West, already referred to, with its dogmatic assertion that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry," and that "our poetry has a language to itself," an assertion which, with other remarks of Gray, helps to emphasize the distinction to be made between the two ideals of poetical diction to be seen persisting through the eighteenth century. It was generally agreed that there must be a special language for poetry, with all its artificial "heightening," "licenses," and variations from the language of prose, to serve the purpose of the traditional "Kinds," especially the Epic and the Lyric. This is the view taken by Gray, but with a difference. He does not accept the conventional diction which Pope's "Homer" had done so much to perpetuate, and hence he creates a poetic language of his own, a glittering array of words and phrases, blending material from varied sources, and including echoes and reminiscences of Milton and Dryden.

The second ideal of style was that of which, as we have seen, the canons had been definitely stated by Pope, and which had been splendidly exemplified in the satires, essays, and epistles. The aim was to reproduce "the colloquial idiom of living society," and the result was a plain, unaffected style, devoid of the ornaments of the poetic language proper, and, in its simplicity and directness, equally suitable for either poetry or prose. Gray could make use of this vehicle of expression, whenever, as in "The Long Story," or the fragmentary "Alliance of Education and Government," it was suitable and adequate for his purpose; but in the main his own practice stood distinct from both the eighteenth century ideals of poetical language. Hence, as it conformed to neither of the accepted standards, Goldsmith and Johnson agreed in condemning his diction, which was perhaps in itself sufficient proof that Gray had struck out a new language for himself.

Among the special problems connected with the diction of poetry to which the eighteenth century critics directed their attention, that of the use of archaic and obsolete words was prominent. It had been one of the methods by which the Elizabethans had hoped to enrich their language, but contemporary critics had expressed their disapproval, and it was left to Jonson, in this as in other similar matters, to express the reasonable view that "the eldest of the present and the newest of the past language is best." Dryden, when about to turn the "Canterbury Tales" "into our language as it is now refined," was to express a similar common-sense view. "When an ancient word," he said, with his Horace no doubt in his mind, "for its sound and significancy deserves to be revived, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity to restore it. All beyond this is superstition."

A few years later the long series of Spenserian imitations had begun, so that the question of the poetic use of archaic and obsolete words naturally came into prominence. Pope, as might be expected, is to be found among the opposition, and in the "Dunciad" he takes the opportunity of showing his contempt for this kind of writing by a satiric gird, couched in supposedly archaic language:

an attack which is augmented by the ironic comment passed by "Scriblerus" in a footnote. Nevertheless, when engaged on his translation of Homer he had an inclination, like Cowper, towards a certain amount of archaism, though it is evident that he is not altogether satisfied on the point.

Johnson, it need hardly be said, was of Pope's opinion on this matter, and the emphatic protest which he, alarmed by such tendencies in the direction of Romanticism, apparent not only in the Spenserian imitations, but still more in such signs of the times as were to culminate in Percy's "Reliques," the Ossianic "simplicities" of Macpherson, and the Rowley "forgeries," is evidence of the strength which the Spenserian revival had by then gained. "To imitate Spenser's fiction and sentiments can incur no reproach," he wrote: "but I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction and his stanza." To the end he continued to express his disapproval of those who favoured the "obsolete style," and, like Pope, he finally indulges in a metrical fling at the innovators:

Phrase that time has flung away Uncouth words in disarray; Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and Elegy and Sonnet.

Goldsmith too had his misgivings. "I dislike the imitations of our old English poets in general," he wrote with reference to "The Schoolmistress," "yet, on this minute subject, the antiquity of the style produces a very ludicrous solemnity."

On this matter of poetic archaism, the point of view of the average cultured reader, as distinct from the writer, is probably accurately represented in one of Chesterfield's letters. Writing to his son, he was particularly urgent that those words only should be employed which were found in the writers of the Augustan age, or of the age immediately preceding. To enforce his point he carefully explained to the boy the distinction between the pedant and the gentleman who is at the same time a scholar; the former affected rare words found only in the pages of obscure or antiquated authors rather than those used by the great classical writers.

This was the attitude adopted in the main by William Cowper, who, after an early enthusiasm for the "quaintness" of old words, when first engaged on his translation of Homer, later repented and congratulated himself on having, in his last revisal, pruned away every "single expression of the obsolete kind." But against these opinions we have to set the frankly romantic attitude of Thomas Warton, who, in his "Observations on the Faerie Queen" , boldly asserts that "if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported," whilst he is quite confident that Spenser's language is not so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be.

Here and there we also come across references to other devices by which the poet is entitled to add to his word-power. Thus Addison grants the right of indulging in coinages, since this is a practice sanctioned by example, especially by that of Homer and Milton. Pope considered that only such of Homer's compound epithets as could be "done literally into English without destroying the purity of our language" or those with good literary sanctions should be adopted. Gray, however, enters a caveat against coinages; in the letter to Beattie, already quoted, he objects to the word "infuriated," and adds a warning not to "make new words without great necessity; it is very hazardous at best."

When we review the "theory" of poetical language in the eighteenth century, as revealed in the sayings, direct and indirect, of poets and critics, we feel that there is little freshness or originality in the views expressed, very little to suggest the changes that were going on underneath, and which were soon to find their first great and reasoned expression. Nominally, it would seem that the views of the eighteenth century "classicists" were adequately represented and summed up in those of Johnson, for whom the ideal of poetical language was that which Dryden had "invented," and of which Pope had made such splendid use in his translation of Homer. In reality, the practice of the "neo-classical" poets was largely influenced by the critical tenets of the school to which they belonged, especially by that pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine according to which poetry was to be an "imitation" of the best models, whilst its words, phrases, and similes were to be such as were generally accepted and consecrated by poetic use. It was this conventionalism, reinforced by, as well as reflecting, the neo-classical outlook on external nature, that resulted in the "poetic diction" which Wordsworth attacked, and it is important to note that a similar stereotyped language is to be found in most of the contemporary poetry of Western Europe, and especially in that of France.

We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that neither Johnson, nor any of his "classical" contemporaries, appears to attach any importance to the fact that Pope in his essays and epistles had set up a standard of diction, of which it is not too much to say that it was an ideal vehicle of expression for the thoughts and feelings it had to convey. So enamoured were they of the pomp and glitter of the "Homer" that they apparently failed to see in this real "Pope style" an admirable model for all writers aiming at lucidity, simplicity, and directness of thought. We may see this clearly by means of an instructive comparison of Johnson's judgments on the two "Pope styles." "It is remarked by Watts," he writes, "that there is scarcely a happy combination of words or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language which Pope has not inserted into his version of Homer." On the other hand, he is perhaps more than unjust to Pope's plain didactic style when he speaks of the "harshness of diction," the "levity without elegance" of the "Essay on Man."

It was not until the neo-classical poetry was in its death-agony that we meet with adequate appreciation of the admirable language which Pope brought to perfection and bequeathed to his successors. "The familiar style," wrote Cowper to Unwin, "is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic--to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake." The "familiar style," which Cowper here definitely characterizes, was in its own special province as good a model as was the beautiful simplicity of Blake when "poetical poetry" had once more come into its own; and it is important to remember that this fact received due recognition from both Wordsworth and Coleridge. "The mischief," wrote the former, "was effected not by Pope's satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among the poets of his class; it was by his 'Homer.'... No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry." And Coleridge, too, called attention to the "almost faultless position and choice of words" in Pope's original compositions, in comparison with the absurd "pseudo-poetic diction" of his translations of Homer. The "Pope style" failed to produce real poetry--poetry of infinite and universal appeal, animated with personal feeling and emotion not merely because of its preference for the generic rather than the typical, but because its practitioners for the most part lacked those qualities of intense imagination in which alone the highest art can have its birth.

THE "STOCK" DICTION OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY

Since the time when Wordsworth launched his manifestoes on the language fit and proper for poetry, it may almost be said that whenever the term "poetic diction" is found used as a more or less generic term of critical disparagement, it has been with reference, implied or explicit, to the so-called classical poetry of the Augustan ages. But the condemnation has perhaps been given too wide an application, and hence there has arisen a tendency to place in this category all the language of all the poets who were supposed to have taken Pope as their model, so that "the Pope style" and "eighteenth century diction" have almost become synonymous terms, as labels for a lifeless, imitative language in which poets felt themselves constrained to express all their thoughts and feelings. This criticism is both unjust and misleading. For when this "false and gaudy splendour" is unsparingly condemned, it is not always recognized or remembered that it is mainly to be found in the descriptive poetry of the period.

It is sufficient to glance at the descriptive verse of practically all the typical "classical" poets to discover how generally true this statement is. We cannot say, of course, that the varied sights and sounds of outdoor life made no appeal at all to them; but what we do feel is that whenever they were constrained to indulge in descriptive verse they either could not, or would not, try to convey their impressions in language of their very own, but were content in large measure to draw upon a common stock of dead and colourless epithets. Local colour, in the sense of accurate and particular observation of natural facts, is almost entirely lacking; there is no writing with the eye on the object, and it has been well remarked that their highly generalized descriptions could be transferred from poet to poet or from scene to scene, without any injustice. Thus Shenstone describes his birthplace:

Romantic scenes of pendent hills And verdant vales, and falling rills, And mossy banks, the fields adorn Where Damon, simple swain, was born--

a quatrain which, with little or no change of epithet, was the common property of the versifiers, and may be met with almost everywhere in early eighteenth century poetry. Every type of English scenery and every phase of outdoor life finds its description in lines of this sort, where the reader instinctively feels that the poet has not been careful to record his individual impressions or emotions, but has contented himself with accepting epithets and phrases consecrated to the use of natural description. A similar inability or indifference is seen even in the attempts to re-fashion Chaucer, or the Bible, or other old material, where the vigour and freshness and colour of the originals might have been expected to exercise a salutary influence. But to no purpose: all must be cast in the one mould, and clothed in the elegant diction of the time. Thus in Dryden's modernization of the "Canterbury Tales" the beautiful simplicity of Chaucer's descriptions of the sights and sounds of nature vanishes when garbed in the rapid and conventional phrases and locutions of the classicists. Chaucer's "briddes" becomes "the painted birds," a "goldfinch" is amplified into a "goldfinch with gaudy pride of painted plumes," whilst a plain and simple mention of sunrise, "at the sun upriste," has to be paraphrased into

Aurora had but newly chased the night And purpled o'er the sky with blushing light.

The old ballads and the Psalms suffered severely in the same way.

The fact that the words most frequently used in this stock poetic diction have usually some sort of connexion with dress or ornament has not escaped notice, and it has its own significance. It is, as it were, a reflex of the fact that the nature poetry of the period is in large measure the work of writers to whom social life is the central fact of existence, for whom meadow, and woodland, and running water, mountain and sea, the silent hills, and the starry sky brought no inspiration, or at least no inspiration powerful enough to lead them to break through the shackles of conventionality imposed upon them by the taste of their age. Words like "paint" and "painted," "gaudy," "adorn," "deck," "gilds" and "gilded," "damasked," "enamelled," "embroidered," and dozens similar form the stock vocabulary of natural description; apart from the best of Akenside, and the works of one or two writers such as John Cunningham, it can safely be said that but few new descriptive terms were added to the "nature vocabulary" of English poetry during this period. How far English poetry is yet distant from a recognition of the sea as a source of poetic inspiration may be perhaps seen from the fact that its most frequent epithet is the feeble term "watery," whilst the magic of the sky by night or day evokes no image other than one that can be expressed by changes rung on such words as "azure," "concave," "serene," "aetherial." Even in "Night Thoughts," where the subject might have led to something new and fresh in the way of a "star-vocabulary," the best that Young can do is to take refuge in such periphrases as "tuneful spheres," "nocturnal sparks," "lucid orbs," "ethereal armies," "mathematic glories," "radiant choirs," "midnight counsellors," etc.

And the same lack of direct observation and individual expression is obvious whenever the classicists have to mention birds or animals. Wild life had to wait for White of Selborne, and for Blake and Burns and Cowper and Wordsworth, to be observed with accuracy and treated with sympathy; and it has been well remarked that if we are to judge from their verse, most of the poets of the first quarter of the eighteenth century knew no bird except the goldfinch or nightingale, and even these probably only by hearsay. For the same generalized diction is usually called upon, and birds are merely a "feathered," "tuneful," "plumy" or "warbling" choir, whilst a periphrasis, allowing of numerous and varied labels for the same animal, is felt to be the correct thing. In Dryden sheep are "the woolly breed" or "the woolly race"; bees are the "industrious kind" or "the frugal kind"; pigs are "the bristly care" or "the tusky kind"; frogs are "the loquacious race"; crows, "the craven kind," and so on: "the guiding principle seems to be that nothing must be mentioned by its own name."

Many of these stock epithets owed their appearance of course to the requirements imposed upon poets by their adherence to the heroic couplet. Pope himself calls attention to the fact that the necessities of rhyme led to the unceasing repetition of stereotyped phrases and locutions:

Where'er you find the "cooling western breeze." In the next line it "whispers through the trees"; If crystal streams "with pleasing murmur creep" The reader's threaten'd, not in vain, with "sleep"--

adducing, with unconscious irony, the very rhymes prevalent in much of his own practice.

It was also recognized by the versifiers that the indispensable polish and "correctness" of the decasyllabic line could only be secured by a mechanical use of epithets in certain positions. "There is a vast beauty ," wrote Shenstone, "in using a word of a particular nature in the 8th and 9th syllable of an English verse. I mean what is virtually a dactyl. For instance,

And pykes, the tyrants of the wat'ry plains.

In the year of Dryden's death there had appeared the "Art of Poetry" by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth century. During the forty years of Dryden's literary career the supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first prosodist to formulate the "rules" of the couplet, and in doing so he succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic tendencies of the time, in "codifying and mummifying" a system which soon became erected into a creed. "The foregoing rules ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables: and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them harshness and discord." Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their vehicle of expression.

Since the "Lives of the Poets" it has been customary to regard this "poetic diction" as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief largely due to Johnson's eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice of his contemporaries. But others--Gray amongst them--did not view their innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope's influence, he says in effect, after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in which it was clothed. Pope had made

poetry a mere mechanic art And every warbler had his tune by heart;

and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer. Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the "poetical diction," against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.

When floating clouds their spongy fleeces drain

or Ambrose Philips:

Hark: how they warble in the brambly bush The gaudy goldfinch or the speckly thrush

and that "Epistle to a Friend," in which he ridicules the very jargon so much used in his own Pastorals.

Pope then may justly be judged "not guilty," at least "in the first degree," of having originated the poetic diction which Johnson praised and Wordsworth condemned; in using it, he was simply using the stock language for descriptive poetry, whether original or in translations, which had slowly come into being during the last decade of the seventeenth century. If it be traced to its origins, it will be found that most of it originated with that poet who may fairly be called the founder of the English "classical" school of poetry--to Milton, to whom in large measure is due, not merely the invention, but also, by the very potency of the influence exercised by his great works, its vogue in the eighteenth century.

Before the time of Milton, it is not too much to say, even when we remember the practice of Spenser and Donne and their followers, that there was no special language for poetry, little or nothing of the diction consecrated solely to the purposes of poets. The poets of the Elizabethan age and their immediate successors had access to all diction, upon which they freely drew. But it seems natural, indeed inevitable, that for Milton, resolved to sing of things "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," the ordinary language of contemporary prose or poetry should be found lacking. He was thus impelled, we may say, consciously and deliberately to form for himself a special poetical vocabulary, which, in his case, was abundantly justified, because it was so essentially fitted to his purpose, and bore the stamp of his lofty poetic genius.

This poetical vocabulary was made up of diverse elements. Besides the numerous "classical" words, which brought with them all the added charm of literary reminiscence, there were archaisms, and words of Latin origin, as well as words deliberately coined on Latin and Greek roots. But it included also most of the epithets of which the eighteenth century versifiers were so fond. Examples may be taken from any of the descriptive portions of the "Paradise Lost":

On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers

About me round I saw Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, And liquid lapse of murmuring streams.

Other phrases, like "vernal bloom," "lucid stream," "starry sphere," "flowery vale," "umbrageous grots," were to become the worn-out penny-pieces of the eighteenth century poetical mint. Milton indeed seems to have been one of the great inventors of adjectives ending in y, though in this respect he had been anticipated by Browne and others, and especially by Chapman, who has large numbers of them, and whose predilection for this method of making adjectives out of nouns amounts almost to an obsession.

With Milton, then, may be said to have originated the "poetic diction," which drew forth Wordsworth's strictures, and which in the sequel proved a dangerous model for the swarm of versifiers who essayed to borrow or imitate it for the purpose of their dull and commonplace themes. How much the Miltonic language, as aped and imitated by the "landscape gardeners and travelling pedlars" of the eighteenth century, lost in originality and freshness, may be felt, rather than described, if we compare so well-known a passage as the following with any of the quotations given earlier:

Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow.

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