we do intend
Gives hope and prospect of as good an end.

Let us therefore in the first place possess those whom we initiate in
the study of poetry with this notion (as one which they ought always to
have at hand), that

'Tis frequently the poet's guise
To intermingle truth with lies;--

which they do sometimes with and sometimes against their wills. They do
it with their wills, because they find strict truth too rigid to comply
with that sweetness and gracefulness of expression, which most are taken
with, so readily as fiction doth. For real truth, though it disgust
never so much, must be told as it is, without alteration; but that which
is feigned in a discourse can easily yield and shift its garb from the
distasteful to that which is more pleasing. And indeed, neither the
measures nor the tropes nor the grandeur of words nor the aptness of
metaphors nor the harmony of the composition gives such a degree of
elegance and gracefulness to a poem as a well-ordered and artificial
fiction doth. But as in pictures the colors are more delightful to the
eye than the lines because those give them a nearer resemblance to the
persons they were made for, and render them the more apt to deceive the
beholder; so in poems we are more apt to be smitten and fall in love
with a probable fiction than with the greatest accuracy that can be
observed in measures and phrases, where there is nothing fabulous or
fictitious joined with it. Wherefore Socrates, being induced by some
dreams to attempt something in poetry, and finding himself unapt, by
reason that he had all his lifetime been the champion of severe truth,
to hammer out of his own invention a likely fiction, made choice of
Aesop's fables to turn into verse; as judging nothing to be true poetry
that had in it nothing of falsehood. For though we have known some
sacrifices performed without pipes and dances, yet we own no poetry
which is utterly destitute of fable and fiction. Whence the verses of
Empedocles and Parmenides, the Theriaca of Nicander, and the sentences
of Theognis, are rather to be accounted speeches than poems, which, that
they might not walk contemptibly on foot, have borrowed from poetry the
chariot of verse, to convey them the more creditably through the world.
Whensoever therefore anything is spoken in poems by any noted and
eminently famous man, concerning gods or daemons or virtue, that is
absurd or harsh, he that takes such sayings for truths is