Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/252

244 more with the phrase. They have read them historically, critically, musically, comically, poetically, and every other way except religiously, and have found their account in doing so. For the Scriptures are undoubtedly a fund of wit, and a subject for wit. You may, according to the modern practice, be witty upon them, or out of them: and, to speak the truth, but for them, I know not what our playwrights would do for images, allusions, similitudes, examples, or even language itself. Shut up the Sacred Books, and I would be bound our wit would run down like an alarum, or fall as the stocks did, and ruin half the poets in these kingdoms. And if that were the case, how would most of that tribe (all, I think, but the immortal Addison, who made a better use of his Bible, and a few more) who dealt so freely in that fund, rejoice that they had drawn out in time, and left the present generation of poets to be the bubbles.

But here I must enter one caution, and desire you to take notice, that in this advice of reading the Scriptures, I had not the least thought concerning your qualification that way for poetical orders; which I mention, because I find a notion of that kind advanced by one of our English poets, and is, I suppose, maintained by the rest. He says to Spencer, in a pretended vision,

Which passage is, in my opinion, a notable allusion to the Scriptures; and making but reasonable allowances for the small circumstance of profaneness, bordering close upon blasphemy, is inimitably fine;