qualifications is born a poet, knows, and can practise the variety
of numbers, and is master of the language in which he writes--if
such a man, I say, be now arisen, or shall arise, I am vain enough
to think that I have proposed a model to him by which he may build a
nobler, a more beautiful, and more perfect poem than any yet extant
since the ancients.

There is another part of these machines yet wanting; but by what I
have said, it would have been easily supplied by a judicious writer.
He could not have failed to add the opposition of ill spirits to the
good; they have also their design, ever opposite to that of Heaven;
and this alone has hitherto been the practice of the moderns: but
this imperfect system, if I may call it such, which I have given,
will infinitely advance and carry farther that hypothesis of the
evil spirits contending with the good. For being so much weaker
since their fall than those blessed beings, they are yet supposed to
have a permitted power from God of acting ill, as from their own
depraved nature they have always the will of designing it--a great
testimony of which we find in Holy Writ, when God Almighty suffered
Satan to appear in the holy synod of the angels (a thing not
hitherto drawn into example by any of the poets), and also gave him
power over all things belonging to his servant Job, excepting only
life.

Now what these wicked spirits cannot compass by the vast
disproportion of their forces to those of the superior beings, they
may by their fraud and cunning carry farther in a seeming league,
confederacy, or subserviency to the designs of some good angel, as
far as consists with his purity to suffer such an aid, the end of
which may possibly be disguised and concealed from his finite