borrow'd Name of some
illustrious Person, of whom Choice is made after we have fram'd the Plan
of the Action which we design to attribute to him.

Nor indeed is Bossu singular in his Judgment on this Matter, there being
few or none who have ever writ on the same Subject, but are of the same
mind: For thus Boileau in his Art of Poetry,

Dans la vaste recit d'une longue action
Se soutient par la Fable & vit de Fiction.

Which his Translator I think better;

In the Narration of some great Design,
Invention, Art, and Fable, all must join.

Rapin too gives his Vote on the same side, Rien n'est, says he, plus
essentiel au Poem Epique, que la Fiction; and quotes Petronius to that
purpose, Per ambages, Deorumque ministeria praecipitandus est Liber
Spiritus. Nor is't only the Moderns who are of this Opinion; for the
Iliads are call'd in Horace, Fabula qua Paridis, &c. And lastly, even
Aristotle himself tells us, "That Fable is the principal thing in an
Heroic Poem; and, as it were, the very Soul of it." [Greek: Arche kai oion
psyche.] And upon this occasion commends Homer for lying with the best
Grace of any Man in the World: Authorities almost too big to admit any
Examination of their Reason, or Opposition to their Sentiments. However, I
see no cause why Poetry should not be brought to the Test, as well as
Divinity, or any more than the other, be believed on its own bare ipse
dixit.

Let us therefore examine the Plan which they lay for a Work of this
Nature, and then we may be better able to guess at those Grounds and
Reasons on which they proceed.

In forming an Heroic-Poem, the first thing they tell us we ought to do, is
to pitch on some Moral Truth, which we desire to enforce on our Reader, as
the Foundation of the whole work. Thus Virgil, as Bossu observes,
designing to render the Roman People pleased and easie under the new
Government of Augustus, laid down this Maxim, as the Foundation of his
Divine AEneis: "That great and notable Changes of State are not
accomplished but by the Order and Will of God: That those who oppose
themselves against them are impious, and frequently punished as they
deserve; and that Heaven is not wanting to take that Hero always under its
particular Protection, whom it chuses for the Execution of such grand
Designs." This for the Moral Truth; we must then, he says, go on to lay
the general Plan of the Fiction, which, together with that Verity, makes
the Fable and Soul of the Poem