[citation needed] In terms of prosody it stands in direct contrast to plain language and its use is sometimes regarded, by current standards of literary taste, as overblown and exaggerated.
In the British Isles, aureation has often been most associated with Scottish renaissance makars, especially William Dunbar or Gavin Douglas, who commonly drew on the rhetoric and diction of classical antiquity in their work.
It occurs as part of a dream vision in which the makar is describing the army of goddesses he has witnessed alighting upon the earth: Discrive I wald, but quho coud wele endyte Hou all the feldís wyth thai lilies quhite Depaynt war bricht, quhilk to the heven did glete?
In simple modern English, this means: "I would (attempt to) describe (the scene), but who could satisfactorily frame in verse the way in which all the fields were radiantly adorned by those white lilies (the landing army) that shone upwards into the sky?
Not you, Homer, sublime as you were in writing, for all your faultlessly ornate diction; nor you, Cicero, whose sweet lips were so consistently lucid in rhetoric: your aureate tongues both [the Greek and the Roman] were not adequate to describe that vision in full."