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
would be endless to make collections of this nature. Homer
illustrates one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass
in a field of corn that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of
the village without stirring a foot for it; and another of them
tossing to and fro in his bed, and burning with resentment, to a
piece of flesh broiled on the coals.
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