rather like the design of two than the answer of one--as if
your actors hold intelligence together, and perform their tricks like
fortune-tellers by confederacy. The hand of art will be too visible.
Neither is it any answer to say that, however you manage it, 'tis still
known to be a play; for a play is still an imitation of nature, and one
can be deceived only with a probability of truth. The mind of man does
naturally tend to truth, and the nearer any thing comes to the imitation
of it, the more readily will the imagination believe.

Rhyme, it is said, circumscribes a quick and luxuriant fancy, which
would extend itself too far on every subject, did not the labour which
is required to well-turned and polished rhyme set bounds to it. But he
who wants judgment to confine his fancy in blank verse, may want it as
much in rhyme; and he who has it will avoid errors in both kinds. Latin
verse was as great a confinement to the imagination as rhyme; yet Ovid's
fancy was not limited by it, and Virgil needed it not to bind his. In
our own language, Ben Jonson confined himself to what ought to be said,
even in the liberty of blank verse; and Corneille, the most judicious of
the French poets, is still varying the same sense a hundred ways, and
dwelling eternally on the same subject, though confined by rhyme.

Such is the substance of Crites' answer to Dryden's Defence of Rhyme;
and Neander, before replying, begs it to be understood that he excludes
all comedy from his defence, and that he does not deny that blank verse
may be also used; but he asserts that, in Serious Plays, where the
subject and characters are great, and the plot unmixed with mirth, which
might allay or divert those concernments which are produced, rhyme is
there as natural, and more effective, than blank verse--for what other
conditions, he asks, are required to make rhyme natural in itself,
besides an election of apt words, and a right disposition of them? The
due choice of your words expresses your sense naturally, and the due
placing them adapts the rhyme to it. If both the words and rhyme be apt,
one verse cannot be made merely for sake of the other, as Crites had
urged; for supposing there be a dependence of sense betwixt the first
line and the second, then, in the natural position of the words, the
latter line must of necessity flow from the former; and if there be no
dependence, yet still the due ordering of words makes the last line as
natural in itself