The second objection which Dr. Hurd brings against the _method_ of this poem, is the rejection of all supernatural agency, or what constitutes the _machinery_ of the ancient epic poem. But for this the critic himself offers a vindication, when he commends the author for not running into the wild fables of the Italian romances, “which had too slender a foundation in the serious belief of his age to justify a relation to them.” Now, by making this _belief_ an essential rule of propriety with respect to the machinery, an author in an enlightened period, such as that of D’avenant, is, in effect, prohibited from its use altogether; for the abstracted nature of a pure and philosophical religion renders it utterly unfit for the purposes of poetical fiction. The works of such Christian poets as have attempted to form a system of machinery upon the ideas of saints, angels, and tutelary spirits, will sufficiently prove that their religion, even with a mixture of popular superstition, was ill calculated to assist their imagination. Two writers, whom one would little expect to meet upon the same ground, Sir Richard Blackmore and Mons. Voltaire, have given instances of the same faulty plan in this respect; and nothing in the good Knight’s epic labours can more deserve the attack of ridicule, than the divine mission in the Henriade for instructing his Majesty in the sublime mysteries of transubstantiation. It was a very just charge which Plato brought against Homer, that he had greatly contributed to debase religion by the unworthy and absurd representations he has given of the celestial beings, both with respect to their power and their justice; and this is a fault which the poet must always in some measure be guilty of, when he too familiarly mixes divine agency with human events. Nor does it appear more favourable to the greatness of the human personages that they are on all occasions so beholden to the immediate interposition of divine allies. The refined and judicious Virgil, though he has tolerably kept up the dignity of his Deities, has yet very much lowered his heroes from this cause. When we see Æneas, the son of a Goddess, aided by a God, and covered with celestial armour, with difficulty vanquishing the gallant Turnus, we conclude, that without such odds, the victory must have fallen on the other side. Under such a system of supernatural agency, there was no other way of exalting a man than making him, like Diomed, war against the Gods, or, like Cato, approve a cause which they had unjustly condemned. Surely, a “_sober_ intermixture of religion” can never be attributed to the ancient epic. The poem of Gondibert is, indeed, without all this mixture of religious machinery, whether it be termed sober or extravagant. Human means are brought to accomplish human ends; and Cowley, in his recommendatory lines prefixed to the work, has thus expressed his approbation of this part of the plan.