In consonance with those who believed poetry best communicated truth because it appealed to man's senses and emotions as well as to his logical faculty, Hill praises those "pictur'd Meanings of Poetry" which "enflame a Reader's Will, and bind down his Attention." Yet his analysis of Trapp's metaphorical expansions of Biblical imagery reveals that Hill does not like detailed descriptions or long-drawn-out comparisons. Instead, he admires the Hebrew ability to spring the imagination with a few vividly concrete details. Prior to Hill one can find, in a few paraphrasers and critics like Denham and Lamy, signs of an appreciation of the concrete suggestiveness of the Bible, but most of the hundreds of paraphrasers had felt it desirable to expand Biblical images to beautify and clarify them. Hill was apparently the first to prove the esthetic loss in such a practice by an analysis of particular paraphrastic expansions. Despite his theory, however, Hill's own paraphrase seems almost as artificial and un-Biblical as those he condemns. He often forgets the principles he preaches. But even in his preface there is evident a blind spot that is a mark of his age. His false ideas of decorum, admiration for Milton, and approval of Dennis's interpretation of the sublime as the "vast" and the "terrible," all lead him to condemn the "low" or the familiar. And his own efforts to "raise" both his language and his comparisons to suit the "high" Biblical subject, result in personifications, compound epithets, and a Miltonic vocabulary, by which the very simplicity he himself found in the Bible is destroyed. Another decade was to pass before John Husbands would demonstrate a clear appreciation for the true simplicity of the Bible and praise its "penmen" in terms close to those employed to describe original genius. Gretchen Graf Pahl Pomona College The essay "Of Genius," from the _Occasional Paper_ (1719), is reproduced from a copy in the New York Public Library. The typescript of Aaron Hill's preface is based on a copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library. Both works are used with permission. THE OCCASIONAL PAPER. VOL. III. NUMB. X. OF GENIUS. The Cartesian _Categories are contain'd in these two Verses,_ Mens, mensura, quies, motus, positura, Figura, Sunt, cum materia, cunctarum Exordia rerum. _The Spiritual Nature_, Mens, _is at the head of All. It ought to be look'd on here, as a Transcendent Nature,_ quae vagatur per omnes Categorias. Bayle's Diction. _on the Heathen Doctrine of many_ Genij. See _CAINITES_. _LONDON_: