heaven, and a minister of hell. The same angel, in the latter instance from Tasso, (as if God had never another messenger belonging to the court, but was confined like Jupiter to Mercury, and Juno to Iris,) when he sees his time, that is, when half of the Christians are already killed, and all the rest are in a fair way to be routed, stickles betwixt the remainders of God's host, and the race of fiends; pulls the devils backward by the tails, and drives them from their quarry; or otherwise the whole business had miscarried, and Jerusalem remained untaken. This, says Boileau, is a very unequal match for the poor devils, who are sure to come by the worst of it in the combat; for nothing is more easy, than for an Almighty Power to bring his old rebels to reason, when he pleases. Consequently, what pleasure, what entertainment, can be raised from so pitiful a machine, where we see the success of the battle from the very beginning of it; unless that, as we are Christians, we are glad that we have gotten God on our side, to maul our enemies, when we cannot do the work ourselves? For, if the poet had given the faithful more courage, which had cost him nothing, or at least have made them exceed the Turks in number, he might have gained the victory for us Christians, without interesting heaven in the quarrel, and that with as much ease, and as little[Pg 25] credit to the conqueror, as when a party of a hundred soldiers defeats another which consists only of fifty.

[Pg 24]

[Pg 25]

This, my lord, I confess, is such an argument against our modern poetry, as cannot be answered by those mediums which have been used. We cannot hitherto boast, that our religion has furnished us with any such machines, as have made the strength and beauty of the ancient buildings.

But what if I venture to advance an invention of my own, to supply the manifest defect of our new writers? I am sufficiently sensible of my weakness; and it is not very probable that I should succeed in such a project, whereof I have not had the least hint from any of my predecessors, the poets, or any of their seconds and coadjutors, the critics. Yet we see the art of war is improved in sieges, and new instruments of death are invented daily; something new in philosophy, and the mechanics, is discovered almost every year; and the science of former ages is improved by the succeeding. I will not detain you with a long preamble to that, which better judges will, perhaps, conclude to be little worth.

It is this, in short—that Christian poets have not hitherto been 

 Prev. P 15/510 next