her is forgotten.

I promised to say somewhat of Poetic Licence, but have in part
anticipated my discourse already. Poetic Licence, I take to be the
liberty which poets have assumed to themselves, in all ages, of
speaking things in verse, which are beyond the severity of prose. It
is that particular character, which distinguishes and sets the bounds
betwixt _oratio soluta_, and poetry. This, as to what regards the
thought, or imagination of a poet, consists in fiction: but then those
thoughts must be expressed; and here arise two other branches of it;
for if this licence be included in a single word, it admits of tropes;
if in a sentence or proposition, of figures; both which are of a much
larger extent, and more forcibly to be used in verse than prose. This
is that birth-right which is derived to us from our great forefathers,
even from Homer down to Ben; and they, who would deny it to us, have,
in plain terms, the fox's quarrel to the grapes--they cannot reach it.

How far these liberties are to be extended, I will not presume to
determine here, since Horace does not. But it is certain that they are
to be varied, according to the language and age in which an author
writes. That which would be allowed to a Grecian poet, Martial tells
you, would not be suffered in a Roman; and it is evident, that the
English does more nearly follow the strictness of the latter, than the
freedoms of the former. Connection of epithets, or the conjunction of
two words in one, are frequent and elegant in the Greek, which yet Sir
Philip Sidney, and the translator of Du Bartas, have unluckily
attempted in the English; though this, I confess, is not so proper an
instance of poetic licence, as it is of variety of idiom in languages.

Horace a little explains himself on this subject of _Licentia
Poetica_, in these verses:

_--Pictoribus atque Poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas: ...
Sed non, ut placidis coeant immitia, non ut
Serpentes avibus geminentur, tigribus haedi._

He would have a poem of a piece; not to begin with one thing, and end
with another: He restrains it so far, that thoughts of an unlike
nature ought not to be joined together. That were indeed to make a
chaos. He taxed not Homer, nor the divine Virgil, for interesting
their gods in the wars of Troy and Italy; neither, had he now lived,
would he have taxed Milton, as our false critics have presumed to do,
for his choice of a supernatural argument; bu