practice is against you; so that if, upon inquiry, you find in yourself any such softnesses, owing to the nature of your education, my advice is, that you forthwith lay down your pen, as having no farther business with it in the way of poetry; unless you will be content to pass for an insipid, or will submit to be hooted at by your fraternity, or can disguise your religion, as well-bred men do their learning, in complaisance to company.
For, poetry, as it has been managed for some years past, by such as make a business of it (and of such only I speak here, for I do not call him a poet that writes for his diversion, any more than that gentleman a fiddler who amuses himself with a violin) I say, our poetry of late has been altogether disengaged from the narrow notions of virtue and piety, because it has been found, by experience of our professors, that the smallest quantity of religion, like a single drop of malt liquor in claret, will muddy and discompose the brightest poetical genius.
Religion supposes Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances, which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour, and such as a true poet cannot possibly give into, with a saving to his poetical license; but yet it is necessary for him, that others should believe these things seriously, that his wit may be exercised on their wisdom, for so doing; for though a wit need not have religion, religion is necessary to a wit, as an instrument is to the hand that plays upon it: and for this, the moderns plead the example of their great idol Lucretius, who had not been by half so eminent a poet (as he truly was) but that he stood tiptoe on re-
ligion,
