Nec retia cervis
  Ulla dolum meditantur;

says Virgil in his Eclogues:  and speaking of Leander, in his Georgics,

  Nocte natat caeca serus freta, quem super ingens
  Porta tonat caeli, et scopulis illisa reclamant
  AEquora:

In both of these, you see, he fears not to give voice and thought to things inanimate.

Will you arraign your master, Horace, for his hardness of expression, when he describes the death of Cleopatra, and says she did—­asperos tractare serpentes, ut atrum corpore combiberet cenenum,—­because the body, in that action, performs what is proper to the mouth?

As for hyperboles, I will neither quote Lucan, nor Statius, men of an unbounded imagination, but who often wanted the poize of judgment.  The divine Virgil was not liable to that exception; and yet he describes Polyphemus thus: 

  _—­Graditurque per aequor
  Jam medium; necdum fluctus latera ardua tinxit._

In imitation of this place, our admirable Cowley thus paints Goliah: 

  The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill;
  And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill: 

where the two words, seemed and methought, have mollified the figure; and yet if they had not been there, the fright of the Israelites might have excused their belief of the giant’s stature[1].

In the eighth of the AEneids, Virgil paints the swiftness of Camilla thus: 

Ilia vel intactae segetis per summa volaret Gramina, nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas; Vel mare per medium, fluctu suspensa tumenti, Ferret iter, celeres nec tingeret aequore plantas.

You are not obliged, as in history, to a literal belief of what the poet says; but you are pleased with the image, without being cozened by the fiction.

Yet even in history, Longinus quotes Herodotus on this occasion of hyperboles.  The Lacedemonians, says he, at the straits of Thermopylae, defended themselves to the last extremity; and when their arms failed them, fought it out with their nails and teeth; till at length, (the Persians shooting continually upon them) they lay buried under the arrows of their enemies.  It is not reasonable, (continues the critic) to believe, that men could defend themselves with their nails and teeth from an armed multitude; nor that they lay buried under a pile of darts and arrows; and yet there wants not probability for the figure:  because the hyperbole seems not to have been made for the sake of the description; but rather to have been produced from the occasion.