ice of words, or places them, for rhyme's sake, so unnaturally as no
man would in ordinary speech. But when it is so judiciously ordered that
the first word in the verse seems to beget the second, and that again
the next, till that becomes the last word in the line, which, in the
negligence of prose, would be so; it must then be granted, that rhyme
has all the advantages of prose--_besides its own_.

"Glorious John" (who must have been laughing in his sleeve) then
declares, that the "excellence and dignity of it were never fully known
till Mr Waller taught it;" that it was afterwards "followed in the epic
by Sir John Denham, in his 'Cooper's Hill,' a poem which your lordship
knows, for the majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, the exact
standard of good writing;" and that we are "acknowledging for the
noblest use of it to Sir William D'Avenant, who at once brought it upon
the stage, _and made it perfect in the Siege of Rhodes_!"

Having thus carried things all his own way, he triumphantly declares,
that the advantages which rhyme has over blank verse are so many, that
"it were lost time to name them." And then, with fresh vigour, he sets
himself to name some of the chief--and first, that one illustrated by
Sir Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesy," "the help it brings to
memory, which rhyme so knits up by the affinity of sound, that by
remembering the last word in one line, we often call to mind both the
verses." Then, in the quickness of repartees (which in discoursive
scenes fall very often) it has, he says, so particular a grace, and is
so aptly united to them, that the sudden smartness of the answer, and
the exactness of the rhyme, set off the beauty of each other.

But its greatest benefit of all, according to Dryden, is, that it bounds
and circumscribes the fancy. The great easiness of blank verse renders
the poet too luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might be
better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words. But when the
difficulty of artificial rhyming is interposed; where the poet commonly
confines his verse to his couplet, and must continue that verse in such
words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme,
the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in; which, seeing
so heavy a task imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses.
And this furnishes a complete answer, he maintains, to the ordinary
objection, that rhyme is only an embroidery of ver