e actors. A
play to be like nature is to be set above it; as statues which are
placed on high are made greater than the life, that they may descend to
the sight in their just proportion.

But rhyme, it has been argued, appears most unnatural in repartees or
short replies, when he who answers (it being presumed he knew not what
the other would say, yet) makes up that part of the verse which was left
incomplete, and supplies both the sound and the measure of it. This,
'tis said, looks rather like the confederacy of two than the answer of
one. But suppose the repartee were made in blank verse, is not the
measure as often supplied there as in rhyme?--the latter half of the
hemistich as commonly made up, or a second line subjoined, as a reply to
the former? But suppose it allowed to look like a confederacy. What more
beautiful than a well-contrived dance? You see there the united design
of many persons to make up one figure: after they have separated
themselves in many petty divisions, they rejoin one by one into a group:
the confederacy is plain among them, for chance could never produce any
thing so beautiful, and yet there is nothing in it that shocks your
sight. True, then, the hand of wit appears in repartee, as it must in
all kinds of verse. When, with the quiet and poignant brevity of it,
there mingles the cadency and sweetness of verse--"the soul of the
hearer has nothing more to desire."

Rhyme was said by its defender to be a help to the poet's judgment, by
putting bounds to a wild overflowing fancy. And it was answered by the
admirer of blank verse, that he who wants judgment in the liberty of his
poesy, may as well show the defect of it when he is confined to verse;
for he who has judgment will avoid errors, and he who has it not will
commit them in all kind of writing. Granted that he who has judgment so
profound, strong, and infallible that he needs no help to keep it always
poised and right, will commit no faults in rhyme or out of it. But where
is that judgment to be found? Take it, therefore, as it is found in the
best poets. Judgment is indeed the master workman in a play; but he
requires many subordinate hands, many tools to his assistance, and rhyme
is one of them--it is a rule and line by which he keeps his building
compact and even, which otherwise lawless imagination would raise
loosely and irregularly--it is, in short, a slow and painful but the
surest kind of working. Second thoughts being usually t