And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill:
where the two words, seemed and methought, have mollified the figure; and yet if they had not been there, the fright of the Israelites might have excused their belief of the giant's stature[1].
In the eighth of the Æneids, Virgil paints the swiftness of Camilla thus:
Ilia vel intactæ segetis per summa volaret
Gramina, nec teneras cursu læsisset aristas;
Vel mare per medium, fluctu suspensa tumenti,
Ferret iter, celeres nec tingeret æquore plantas.
You are not obliged, as in history, to a literal belief of what the poet says; but you are pleased with the image, without being cozened by the fiction.
Yet even in history, Longinus quotes Herodotus on this occasion of hyperboles. The Lacedemonians, says he, at the straits of Thermopylæ, defended themselves to the last extremity; and when their arms failed them, fought it out with their nails and teeth; till at length, (the Persians shooting continually upon them) they lay buried under the arrows of their enemies. It is not reasonable, (continues the critic) to believe, that men could defend themselves with their nails and teeth from an armed multitude; nor that they lay buried under a pile of darts and arrows; and yet there wants not probability for the figure: because the hyperbole seems not to have been made for the sake of the description; but rather to have been produced from the occasion.
It is true, the boldness of the figures is to be hidden sometimes by the address of the poet; that they may work their effect upon the mind, without discovering the art which caused it. And therefore they are principally to be used in passion; when we speak more warmly, and with more precipitation than at other times: For then, Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi; the poet must put on the passion he endeavours to represent: A man in such an occasion is not cool enough, either to reason rightly, or to talk calmly. Aggravations are then in their proper places; interrogations, exclamations, hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse, are graceful there, because they are natural. The sum of all depends on what before I hinted, that this boldness of expression is not to be blamed, if it be managed by the coolness and discretion which is necessary to a poet.