'That it is not necessary in Poetry for the Points of the Comparison to correspond with one another exactly, but that a general Resemblance is sufficient, and that too much Nicety in this Particular favours of the Rhetorician and Epigrammatist.'
In short, if we look into the Conduct of Homer, Virgil and Milton, as the great Fable is the Soul of each Poem, so to give their Works an agreeable Variety, their Episodes are so many short Fables, and their Similes so many short Episodes; to which you may add, if you please, that their Metaphors are so many short Similes. If the Reader considers the Comparisons in the first Book of Milton, of the Sun in an Eclipse, of the Sleeping Leviathan, of the Bees swarming about their Hive, of the Fairy Dance, in the view wherein I have here placed them, he will easily discover the great Beauties that are in each of those Passages.
L.
his
A journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, A.D. 1697. By Henry Maundrell, M.A. It was published at Oxford in 1703, and was in a new edition in 1707. It reached a seventh edition in 1749. Maundrell was a Fellow of Exter College, which he left to take the appointment of chaplain to the English factory at Aleppo. The brief account of his journey is in the form of a diary, and the passage quoted is under the date, March 15, when they were two days' journey from Tripoli. The stream he identifies with the Adonis was called, he says, by Turks Ibrahim Pasha. It is near Gibyle, called by the Greeks Byblus, a place once famous for the birth and temple of Adonis. The extract from Paradise Lost and the passage from Maundrell were interpolated in the first reprint of the Spectator.