He that wants teeth may as well
venture upon a piece of tough horny brawn as such a line, for he will
look like an ass eating thistles.
He never begins a work without an invocation of his Muse; for it is not
fit that she should appear in public to show her skill before she is
entreated, as gentlewomen do not use to sing until they are applied to
and often desired.
I shall not need to say anything of the excellence of poetry, since it
has been already performed by many excellent persons, among whom some
have lately undertaken to prove that the civil government cannot
possibly subsist without it, which, for my part, I believe to be true in
a poetical sense, and more probable to be received of it than those
strange feats of building walls and making trees dance which antiquity
ascribes to verse. And though philosophers are of a contrary opinion and
will not allow poets fit to live in a commonwealth, their partiality is
plainer than their reasons, for they have no other way to pretend to
this prerogative themselves, as they do, but by removing poets whom they
know to have a fairer title; and this they do so unjustly that Plato,
who first banished poets his republic, forgot that that very
commonwealth was poetical. I shall say nothing to them, but only desire
the world to consider how happily it is like to be governed by those
that are at so perpetual a civil war among themselves, that if we should
submit ourselves to their own resolution of this question, and be
content to allow them only fit to rule if they could but conclude it so
themselves, they would never agree upon it.
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