reasonable as to conclude there is no day, because a blind man cannot distinguish of light and colours.  Ought they not rather, in modesty, to doubt of their own judgments, when they think this or that expression in Homer, Virgil, Tasso, or Milton’s “Paradise,” to be too far strained, than positively to conclude, that it is all fustian, and mere nonsense?  It is true, there are limits to be set betwixt the boldness and rashness of a poet; but he must understand those limits, who pretends to judge as well as he who undertakes to write:  and he who has no liking to the whole, ought, in reason, to be excluded from censuring of the parts.  He must be a lawyer before he mounts the tribunal; and the judicature of one court, too, does not qualify a man to preside in another.  He may be an excellent pleader in the Chancery, who is not fit to rule the Common Pleas.  But I will presume for once to tell them, that the boldest strokes of poetry, when they are managed artfully, are those which most delight the reader.

Virgil and Horace, the severest writers of the severest age, have made frequent use of the hardest metaphors, and of the strongest hyperboles; and in this case the best authority is the best argument; for generally to have pleased, and through all ages, must bear the force of universal tradition.  And if you would appeal from thence to right reason, you will gain no more by it in effect, than, first, to set up your reason against those authors; and, secondly, against all those who have admired them.  You must prove, why that ought not to have pleased, which has pleased the most learned, and the most judicious; and, to be thought knowing, you must first put the fool upon all mankind.  If you can enter more deeply, than they have done, into the causes and resorts of that which moves pleasure in a reader, the field is open, you may be heard:  But those springs of human nature are not so easily discovered by every superficial judge:  It requires philosophy, as well as poetry, to sound the depth of all the passions; what they are in themselves, and how they are to be provoked:  And in this science the best poets have excelled.  Aristotle raised the fabric of his poetry from observation of those things, in which Euripides, Sophocles, and AEschylus pleased:  He considered how they raised the passions, and thence has drawn rules for our imitation.  From hence have sprung the tropes and figures, for which they wanted a name, who first practised them, and succeeded in them.  Thus I grant you, that the knowledge of nature was the original rule; and that all poets ought to study her, as well as Aristotle and Horace, her interpreters.  But then this also undeniably follows, that those things, which delight all ages, must have been an imitation of nature; which is all I contend.  Therefore is rhetoric made an art; therefore the names of so many tropes and figures were invented; because it was observed they had such and such effect upon the audience.  Therefore catachreses and hyperboles have found their place amongst them; not that they were to be avoided, but to be used judiciously, and placed in poetry, as heightenings and shadows are in painting, to make the figure bolder, and cause it to stand off to sight.