The Homeric theology he urges was still substantially sound, and Homer had always a distinct moral and political purpose.

The Iliad, for example, was meant to show the wickedness of quarrelling, and the evil results of an insatiable thirst for glory, though shallow persons have thought that Homer only thought to please.
The artificial diction about which so much has been said is the natural vehicle of this treatment.

The set of phrases and the peculiar mould into which his sentences were cast, was already the accepted type for poetry which aimed at dignity.

He was following Dryden as his own performance became the law for the next generation.

The style in which a woman is called a nymph--and women generally are "the fair"-- in which shepherds are conscious swains, and a poet invokes the muses and strikes a lyre, and breathes on a reed, and a nightingale singing becomes Philomel "pouring her throat," represents a fashion as worn out as hoops and wigs.