o the mind, with at least the shadow of things, where
the substance cannot be had."

13. "For if the matter be thoroughly considered, a strong argument may
be drawn from poesy, that a more stately greatness of things, a more
perfect order, and a more beautiful variety, delights the soul of man
than any way can be found in nature since the fall. Wherefore, seeing
the acts and events, which are the subjects of true history, are not of
that amplitude as to content the mind of man, poesy is ready at hand to
feign acts more heroical."

14. "Because true history reports the successes of business not
proportionable to the merit of virtues and vices, poesy corrects it, and
presents events and fortunes according to desert, and according to the
law of Providence: because true history, through the frequent satiety
and similitude of things, works a distaste and misprision in the mind of
man; poesy cheereth and refresheth the soul, chanting things rare and
various, and full of vicissitudes."

15. "So as poesy serveth and conferreth to delectation, magnanimity and
morality; and therefore it may seem deservedly to have some
participation of divineness, because it doth raise the mind, and exalt
the spirit with high raptures, proportioning the shew of things to the
desires of the mind, and not submitting the mind to things as reason and
history do. And by these allurements and congruities, whereby it
cherisheth the soul of man, joined also with concert of music, whereby
it may more sweetly insinuate itself; it hath won such access, that it
hath been in estimation, even in rude times, among barbarous nations,
when our learning stood excluded."

16. But there is nothing which favours and falls in with this natural
greatness and dignity of human nature so much as religion, which does
not only promise the entire refinement of the mind, but the glorifying
of the body, and the immortality of both.

_Custom a Second Nature_.

1. There is not a common saying which has a better turn of sense in it
than what we often hear in the mouths of the vulgar, that Custom is a
second Nature. It is indeed able to form the man anew, and give him
inclinations and capacities altogether different from those he was born
with.

2. Dr. _Plot_, in his history of _Staffordshire_, tells of an idiot,
that chancing to live within the sound of a clock, and always amusing
himself with counting the hour of the day whenever the clock struck: the
clock being