Having influence.--Pickering, Vocabulary.
Persons who are strangers to the influential motives of the day.--Marshall, Life of Washington, Vol. V. p. 380.
This word has been called an Americanism; but such is not the case. "I once," said Canning to Mr. Rush, "had a skirmish about language with him, (Mr. Pinckney, of Maryland, our ambassador,) but he worsted me. I said there was no such word as influential, except in America; but he convinced me that it was originally carried over from Eng land." Lord Stafford has remarked, that it was so good a word, they ought to bring it back. "Yes," said Mr. Canning, "it is a very good word, and I know no reason why it should have remained in America, but that we lost the thing."--Rush, Mem. of a Res. at London, p. 260.
I take the following examples from Richardson:
And now our overshadow'd souls (to whose beauties stars were foils) may be exactly emblem'd by those crusted globes, whose influential emissions are intercepted by the interposal of the benighting element, while the purer essence is imprisoned within the narrow compass of a centre.--Glanville.
Thy influential vigor reinspires
This feeble frame, dispels the shade of death,
And bids me throw myself on God in prayer.--Thomson, Sickness.