the poets' world, and as great,
perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of
the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart
to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as
finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this
place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his
friend Davenant's want of invention, says of these fabulous creations
in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of _Gondibert_, that
'impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron
men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily
feigned by them that dare'. These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto.
But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to
show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),
enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto
and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For
proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the
Third, Canto Twelfth, of the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of
Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at its first introduction of the
Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn,
hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something
in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in
shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with
variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills.
Chaucer's steed of brass, that was

So horsly and so quick of eye,

is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen
muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a
childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique
himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought
he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of
discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he
fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations
'impossible'! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to
the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded;
the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions
with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did
not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing
them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in whi