Page:The Works of Abraham Cowley - volume 1 (ed. Aikin) (1806).djvu/140

 cellencies, and with such incomparable variety of wonderful actions and accidents, became the greatest monarch that ever sat on the most famous throne of the whole earth? Whom should a poet more justly seek to honour, than the highest person who ever honoured his profession? whom a Christian poet, rather than the man after God's own heart, and the man who had that sacred pre-eminence above all other princes, to be the best and mightiest of that royal race from whence Christ himself, according to the flesh, disdained not to descend?

When I consider this, and how many other bright and magnificent subjects of the like nature the holy Scripture affords and proffers, as it were, to poesy; in the wise managing and illustrating whereof the glory of God Almighty might be joined with the singular utility and noblest delight of mankind; it is not without grief and indignation that I behold that divine science employing all her inexhaustible riches of wit and eloquence, either in the wicked and beggarly flattery of great persons, or the unmanly idolizing of foolish women, or the wretched affectation of scurril laughter, or at best on the confused antiquated dreams of senseless fables and metamorphoses. Amongst all holy and consecrated things, which the devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the Deity; as altars, temples, sacrifices, prayers, and the like; there is none