Hobbes on worldbuilding?

from Thomas Hobbes, "On Epic Poetry" (1650):

There are some that are not pleased with fiction unless it be bold; not only to exceed the work, but also the possibility of nature. They would have impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, which are easily feigned by them that dare. Against such I defend you (without assenting to those that condemn either Homer or Virgil) by dissenting only from those that think the beauty of a poem consisteth in exorbitancy of the fiction. For as truth is the bound of historical, so the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty. In old time amongst the heathen such strange fictions, and metamorphoses, were not so remote from the articles of their faith as they are now from ours, and therefore were not so unpleasant. Beyond the actual works of nature a poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of nature, never. I can allow a geographer to make, in the sea, a fish or a ship which by the scale of his map would be two or three hundred miles long, and think it done for ornament, because it is done without the precincts of his undertaking; but when he paints an elephant so, I presently apprehend it as ignorance ,and a plain confession of terra incognita.

from English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford 1999. p. 614.