He did not, like Rossetti, go to the glossaries; but "Nares," of which he never possessed a copy, contains his credentials. Thus _shard_ is Shakespearian. Drayton has _shawm_. "_Soilure_" is in "Troilus and Cressida"; "with drunken _spilth_ of wine" in "Timon of Athens." "_Swart_," "_swink_," "_targe_," "_amerce_," "_avouch_," "_assoile_" are all of common acceptance; "_bruit_," "_eld_," "_empery_," "_immediacy_," "_ostent_," "_threne_," "_incarnadine_," and "_troublous_" are all Shakespearian, and more. "_To gloom_," according to precedent, is a verb, and so are "_to englut_," and "_to fantasy_"; "_lustyhed_" is Drayton's and Spenser's. "_Rondure_" is common; "_rampire_" is in Dryden even; "_to port_" and "_ported_," and, of course, "_natheless_" are accepted. "_Crystalline_," being Cowley's if for no other reason, would be ready to his tongue; "_devirginate_," which has the sound of one of his own prolongations, is Donne's; "_adamantean_" he would probably have coined, if Milton had not done so before him. "_Temerarious_" came to him as naturally as to Sir Thomas Browne. "_Femineity_" is Browning's, and "_devisal_" Patmore's, in their modern usage. "_Immures_" as a substantive still annoys his readers, but only before they find it in "Troilus and Cressida."
His Latinisms were frequent. Of these the only test to the point is Dryden's: "If too many foreign words are poured in, it looks as if they were designed, not to assist the natives, but to conquer them." From a mature opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a constant favourite, that his "prose suffered neither from excess of Latinities nor from insufficiency in the vulgar tongue," we learn that Thompson was careful to observe the balance.
In answer to the common rebuke against F. T., A. M. in the _Nation_, November 23, 1907, says:--
"Obviously there are Latinisms and Latinisms! Those of Gibbon and Johnson, and of their time generally, serve to hold passion well at arm's length; they are the mediate and not the immediate utterance of human feeling. But in F. T. the majestic Latin word is forged hot on the anvil of the artificer. No Old English in the making could be readier or closer."
His own rule of writing was, "That it is the infantries of language, so to speak, which must make up the mass of a poet's forces; _i.e._ common diction of the many in every age; the numerous terms of prose, apart from special poetic diction."