he
passion he endeavours to represent: A man in such an occasion is not
cool enough, either to reason rightly, or to talk calmly. Aggravations
are then in their proper places; interrogations, exclamations,
hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse, are graceful
there, because they are natural. The sum of all depends on what before
I hinted, that this boldness of expression is not to be blamed, if it
be managed by the coolness and discretion which is necessary to a
poet.

Yet before I leave this subject, I cannot but take notice how
disingenuous our adversaries appear: All that is dull, insipid,
languishing, and without sinews, in a poem, they call an imitation of
nature: They only offend our most equitable judges, who think beyond
them; and lively images and elocution are never to be forgiven.

What fustian, as they call it, have I heard these gentlemen find out
in Mr Cowley's Odes! I acknowledge myself unworthy to defend so
excellent an author, neither have I room to do it here; only in
general I will say, that nothing can appear more beautiful to me, than
the strength of those images which they condemn.

Imaging is, in itself, the very height and life of poetry. It is, as
Longinus describes it, a discourse, which, by a kind of enthusiasm, or
extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us, that we behold
those things which the poet paints, so as to be pleased with them, and
to admire them.

If poetry be imitation, that part of it must needs be best, which
describes most lively our actions and passions; our virtues and our
vices; our follies and our humours: For neither is comedy without its
part of imaging; and they who do it best are certainly the most
excellent in their kind. This is too plainly proved to be denied: But
how are poetical fictions, how are hippocentaurs and chimeras, or how
are angels and immaterial substances to be imaged; which, some of
them, are things quite out of nature; others, such whereof we can have
no notion? This is the last refuge of our adversaries; and more than
any of them have yet had the wit to object against us. The answer is
easy to the first part of it: The fiction of some beings which are not
in nature, (second notions, as the logicians call them) has been
founded on the conjunction of two natures, which have a real separate
being. So hippocentaurs were imaged, by joining the natures of a man
and horse together; as Lucretius tells us, who has used this word of