made them exceed the Turks in number, he might have gained the
victory for us Christians without interesting Heaven in the quarrel,
and that with as much ease and as little credit to the conqueror as
when a party of a hundred soldiers defeats another which consists
only of fifty.

This, my lord, I confess is such an argument against our modern
poetry as cannot be answered by those mediums which have been used.
We cannot hitherto boast that our religion has furnished us with any
such machines as have made the strength and beauty of the ancient
buildings.

But what if I venture to advance an invention of my own to supply
the manifest defect of our new writers? I am sufficiently sensible
of my weakness, and it is not very probable that I should succeed in
such a project, whereof I have not had the least hint from any of my
predecessors the poets, or any of their seconds or coadjutors the
critics. Yet we see the art of war is improved in sieges, and new
instruments of death are invented daily. Something new in
philosophy and the mechanics is discovered almost every year, and
the science of former ages is improved by the succeeding. I will
not detain you with a long preamble to that which better judges
will, perhaps, conclude to be little worth.

It is this, in short--that Christian poets have not hitherto been
acquainted with their own strength. If they had searched the Old
Testament as they ought, they might there have found the machines
which are proper for their work, and those more certain in their
effect than it may be the New Testament is in the rules sufficient
for salvation. The perusing of one chapter in the prophecy of