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.

_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 t