rapport with the potential of the print technology, is an easily 
recognizable and understandable attitude. Bishop Sprat in his 
History of the Royal Society  (1667) is prepared to dispense, 
not only with decorum and levels of style, but with poetry itself. 
Myths and fables were the fanciful rhetoric of the childhood of 
the race:

     the first masters of knowledge among them were as well 
     Poets, as Philosophers; for Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus and 
     Homer, first softened men’s natural rudeness, and by the 
     charms of their Numbers, allur’d them to be instructed by 
     the severer doctrines of Solon, Thales and Pythagoras. 
     This was a course that was useful at first, when men were 
     to be delightfully deceiv’d to their own good. But perhaps 
     it left some ill influence, on the whole Philosophy of their 
     Successors; and gave the Grecians occasion ever after of