ays Dr Johnson, "the subject of the disputation is not piety,
but the motives to piety." Why introduce the word "disputation," as if
it characterised justly and entirely all didactic poetry? And who ever
heard of an essential distinction between piety, and motives to piety?
Mr James Montgomery, in a very excellent Essay prefixed to that most
interesting collection, "The Christian Poet," well observes, that
"motives to piety must be of the _nature_ of piety, otherwise they could
never incite to it--the precepts and sanctions of the Gospel might as
well be denied to be any part of the Gospel." And, for our own parts, we
scarcely know what piety is, separated from its motives--or how, so
separated, it could be expressed in words at all.

With regard, again, to descriptive poetry, the argument, if argument it
may be called, is still more lame and impotent. "A poet," it is said,
"may describe the beauty and the grandeur of nature, the flowers of the
spring and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide and the
revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader
shall lay aside." Most true he may; but then we are told, "the subject
of the description is not God, but the works of God!" Alas! what
trifling--what miserable trifling is this! In the works of God, God is
felt to be by us His creatures, whom He has spiritually endowed. We
cannot look on them, even in our least elevated moods, without some
shadow of love or awe; in our most elevated moods, we gaze on them with
religion. By the very constitution of our intelligence, the effects
speak of the cause. We are led by nature up to nature's God. The Bible
is not the only revelation--there is another--dimmer but not less
divine--for surely the works are as the words of God. No great poet, in
describing the glories and beauties of the external world, is forgetful
of the existence and attributes of the Most High. That thought, and that
feeling, animate all his strains; and though he dare not to describe Him
the Ineffable, he cannot prevent his poetry from being beautifully
coloured by devotion, tinged by piety--in its essence it is religious.

It appears, then, that the qualifications or restrictions with which Dr
Johnson is willing to allow that there may be didactic and descriptive
sacred poetry, are wholly unmeaning, and made to depend on distinctions
which have no existence.

Of narrative poetry of a sacred kind, Mr Montgomery well remarks,
John