One thing upon which almost all would have agreed, however, was the adoption of the historical point of view in the approach to Hebrew poetry. Yet many of Hill's predecessors had stopped short with the historical justification. Blackmore, for instance, had condemned as bigots and sectarians all those who denied that the Hebrew way was as great as the classical. He had pronounced it a mere accident of fate that modern poetry of Western Europe was modeled on that of Greece and Rome rather than on that of ancient Israel. But he had been perfectly willing to accept that fate--and to remodel the form and style of the book of Job on what he considered the pattern of the classical epic. Hill is as far as most of his contemporaries from appreciating such a literal translation as the King James Version. On the other hand, he is one of a small group of critics who were beginning to see that at least certain aspects of Biblical style were of universal appeal; that they might be as effective psychologically for the modern Englishman as for the ancient Jew. And he sees in this collection of ancient Oriental literature a corrective for some of the worst tendencies of a degenerate contemporary poetry. Hill's attack upon the current preoccupation with form and polish, and his contempt for mere smoothness, for the padded redundancy of Addison and the elaborate rhetoric of Trapp, are all part of a campaign waged by a small group of critics to make poetry once again a vehicle of the very highest truth. He insists, too, that great thought cannot be contained within the untroubled cadences of the heroic couplet. His own preference led to the freer, though currently unfashionable, Pindaric, the irregularity of which seemed justified by Biblical example, for despite a century and a half of study and speculation the secret of Biblical verse had not been solved and to most critics even the Psalms appeared devoid of any pattern. Indeed, Cowley had declared that in their freedom of structure and abruptness of transition the odes of Pindar were like nothing so much as the poetry of Israel. In addition, Hill would have the modern poet profit by another quality of Biblical style: its magic combination of a "magnificent Plainness" with the "Spirit of Imagery." This is the Hebrew virtue of concrete suggestiveness, so highly prized by 20th-century critics and so alien to the generalized abstractions and the explicit clarity of much 18th-century poetry.