Page:Gondibert, an heroick poem - William Davenant (1651).djvu/69

 of Virtue you have drawn, is too long. And to shew him one, is to prejudice the rest; yet I cannot forbear to point him to the Description of Love in the person of Birtha, in the seventh Canto of the second Book. There has nothing been said of that Subject neither by the Ancient nor Modern Poets comparable to it. Poets are painters: I would fain see another painter draw so true, perfect and natural a Love to the Life, and make use of nothing but pure Lines, without the help of any the least uncomely shadow, as you have done. But let it be read as a piece by it self, for in the almost equal height of the whole, the eminence of parts is Lost.

There are some that are not pleased with fiction, unless it be bold; not onely to exceed the work, but also the possibility of Nature: they would have impenetrable Armours, Inchanted Castles, Invulnerable Bodies, Iron Men, Flying Horses, and a thousand other such things, which are easily feigned by them that dare. Against such I defend you (without assenting to those that condemn either Homer or Virgil) by dissenting onely from those that think the Beauty of a Poem consisteth in the exorbitancy of the fiction. For as truth is the bound of Historical, so the Resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of Poetical Liberty. In old time amongst the Heathen such strange fictions, and Metamorphoses, were not so remote from the Articles of their Faith, as they are now from ours, and therefore were not so unpleasant. Beyond the actual works of Nature a Poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of Nature, never. I can allow a Geographer to make in the Sea, a Fish or a Ship, which by the scale of his Map would be two or three hundred mile long, and think it done for ornament, because it is done without the precincts of his undertaking; but when he paints an Elephant so, I presently apprehend it as ignorance, and a plain confession of Terra incognita.

As the description of Great Men and Great Actions, is the constant design of a Poet; so the descriptions of worthy