Meanwhile there is no less
certainty and agreement in poetry than the mathematics, for they all
submit to the same rules without dispute or controversy. But whosoever
shall please to look into the records of antiquity shall find their
title so unquestioned that the greatest princes in the whole world have
been glad to derive their pedigrees, and their power too, from poets.
Alexander the Great had no wiser a way to secure that Empire to himself
by right which he had gotten by force than by declaring himself the son
of Jupiter; and who was Jupiter but the son of a poet? So Caesar and all
Rome was transported with joy when a poet made Jupiter his colleague in
the Empire; and when Jupiter governed, what did the poets that
governed Jupiter?
A PHILOSOPHER
Seats himself as spectator and critic on the great theatre of the world,
and gives sentence on the plots, language, and action of whatsoever he
sees represented, according to his own fancy. He will pretend to know
what is done behind the scene, but so seldom is in the right that he
discovers nothing more than his own mistakes. When his profession was in
credit in the world, and money was to be gotten by it, it divided itself
into multitudes of sects, that maintained themselves and their opinions
by fierce and hot contests with one another; but since the trade decayed
and would not turn to account, they all fell of themselves, and now the
world is so unconcerned in their controversies, that three Reformado
sects joined in one, like Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, will not serve
to maintain one pedant.
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