Page:Modern Parnassus - Leigh Hunt (1814).djvu/12

viii vention of the new poetic art, I merely take to myself the credit of collecting and methodizing the principles and maxims, which lie scattered here and there throughout the numerous successful poems of the present remarkable æra.

As in the schools of our universities every sentiment is uttered in a learned language, so, it is well known, that, in the school of the ancient poets, it was customary to use only the language of verse, even upon prosaic subjects. They therefore threw into a metrical form their art of poetry, which might perhaps have been more explicitly and methodically described in prose; and they preferred the didactic strains of Horace to the critical discourses of Aristotle. Hence it is, that, although a discussion in prose, upon the