This, says Boileau, is
a very unequal match for the poor devils, who are sure to come by
the worst of it in the combat; for nothing is more easy than for an
Almighty Power to bring His old rebels to reason when He pleases.
Consequently what pleasure, what entertainment, can be raised from
so pitiful a machine, where we see the success of the battle from
the very beginning of it? unless that as we are Christians, we are
glad that we have gotten God on our side to maul our enemies when we
cannot do the work ourselves. For if the poet had given the
faithful more courage, which had cost him nothing, or at least have
made them exceed the Turks in number, he might have gained the
victory for us Christians without interesting Heaven in the quarrel,
and that with as much ease and as little credit to the conqueror as
when a party of a hundred soldiers defeats another which consists
only of fifty.
This, my lord, I confess is such an argument against our modern
poetry as cannot be answered by those mediums which have been used.
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