genius, and to throw some thoughts together on so uncommon a
subject.

Among great geniuses those few draw the admiration of all the world
upon them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who, by the
mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or
learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own
times and the wonder of posterity. There appears something nobly
wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses, that is
infinitely more beautiful than all turn and polishing of what the
French call a bel esprit, by which they would express a genius
refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most
polite authors. The greatest genius which runs through the arts and
sciences takes a kind of tincture from them and falls unavoidably
into imitation.

Many of these great natural geniuses, that were never disciplined
and broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and
in particular among those of the more Eastern parts of the world.
Homer has innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and
in the Old Testament we find several passages more elevated and
sublime than any in Homer. At the same time that we allow a greater
and more daring genius to the ancients, we must own that the
greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they
were much above the nicety and correctness of the moderns. In their
similitudes and allusions, provided there was a likeness, they did
not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison:
thus Solomon resembles the nose of his beloved to the tower of
Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus, as the coming of a thief in
the night is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament. It