minishes it by mean, and
contemptible Metaphors. Speaking of the Skies, he says they were

Spun thin, and wove, on Nature's finest Loom.

Longinus is very angry with Timaeus for saying of Alexander, that
he conquer'd all Asia, in less Time than Isocrates took to write
his Panegyric, "Because, says the Critick, it is a pitiful
Comparison of Alexander the Great with a Schoolmaster." What then
wou'd he have said of Sir Richard's Metaphorical Comparison of
the CREATOR Himself, to a Spinster, and a Weaver? The very Beasts
of Mr. Milton, who kept Moses in his Eye, carry Infinitely more
Majesty, than the Skies of Sir Richard.

The Grassy Clods now calv'd; and half appear'd
The tawny Lyon, pawing to get free
His hinder Parts; then springs, as broke from Bonds,
And, rampant, shakes aloft, his brinded Main!
The heaving Leopard, rising, like the Mole,
In Heaps the crumbling Earth about him threw!

These animated Images, or pictured Meanings of Poetry, are the
forcible Inspirers, which enflame a Reader's Will, and bind down
his Attention. They arise from living Words, as Aristotle calls
them; that is, from Words so finely chosen, and so Justly ranged,
that they call up before a Reader the Spirit of their Sense, in
that very Form, and Action, it impressed upon the Writer. But
when the Idea, which a Poet strives to raise, is in itself
magnificent and striking, the Dawb of Metaphor, or any spumy
Colourings of Rhetoric can but deaden, and efface it.

If Sir Richard had said, concerning the Skies, on any other
Subject but This, of the Creation, that they were 'spun thin, and
wove, on Nature's finest Loom,' the Thought had been so far from
Impropriety, as to have been pleasing, and praise-worthy; But
when the Image he wou'd set before us, is the Maker of Heaven and
Earth, in all the dreadful Majesty of his Omnipotence, producing
at a Word, the noblest Part of the Creation, and 'spreading out
the Heavens as a Curtain'; In this tremendous Exercise of his
Divinity, to compare him to a Weaver, and his Expansion of the
Skies, to the low Mechanism of a 'Loom,' is injudiciously to
diminish an Idea, he pretends to heighten and illustrate.

I will end with a Word or two concerning the different Measure of
the Verse, in which the following Poem is written; and which is
apt to disgust Readers, not well grounded in Poetry, because it
requires a fuller Degree of Attention than the Couplet, and, as
M