In Aaron Hill's preface to the paraphrase of Genesis, published
in 1720, we find no preoccupation with the fatality of
temperament and style. But we do find a rising discontent with
the emptiness and restraint of much contemporary verse, and a
very real preference for a more meaningful and a more emotional
and imaginative poetry. We find, in fact, a genuine appreciation
for the poetry of the Old Testament--a poetry which Biblical
scholars like Le Clerc were already viewing as the product of
untrained primitives.

Hill was not alone in his admiration for Biblical style, for the
praise of the "unclassical" poetry of the Bible, which had begun
in the Renaissance, had swelled rather than diminished during the
neoclassical age. By the second decade of the 18th century such
Augustans as Dennis, Gildon, and Pope were crying up its
beauties. Not all agreed, of course, on just what those beauties
were. And still less did they agree on the extent to which
contemporary poetry should imitate them.

One thing upon which almost all would have agreed, however, was
the adoption of the historical point of view in the approach to
Hebrew poetry. Yet many of Hill's predecessors had stopped short
with the historical justification. Blackmore, for instance, had
condemned as bigots and sectarians all those who denied that the
Hebrew way was as great as the classical. He had pronounced it a
mere accident of fate that modern poetry of Western Europe was
modeled on that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient
Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that
fate--and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on
what he considered the pattern of the classical epic.