re always the effect of some hasty
concernment; and something of consequence depends upon them.

"Thus, CRITES! I have endeavoured to answer your objections. It remains
only that I should vindicate an argument for Verse, which you have gone
about to overthrow.

"It had formerly been said [p. 492] that, 'The easiness of Blank Verse
renders the Poet too luxuriant; but that the labour of Rhyme bounds and
circumscribes an over fruitful fancy: the Sense there being commonly
confined to the Couplet; and the words so ordered that the Rhyme
naturally follows them, not they, the Rhyme.'

"To this, you answered, that 'It was no argument to the question in hand:
for the dispute was not which way _a man may write best_; but which is
_most proper for the subject on which he writes_.'

"First. Give me leave, Sir, to remember you! that the argument on which
you raised this objection was only secondary. It was built upon the
hypothesis, that to write in Verse was proper for serious Plays. Which
supposition being granted (as it was briefly made out in that discourse,
by shewing how Verse might be made _natural_): it asserted that this way
of writing was a help to the Poet's judgement, by putting bounds to a
wild, overflowing Fancy. I think therefore it will not be hard for me to
make good what it was to prove.

"But you add, that, 'Were this let pass; yet he who wants judgement in
the liberty of the Fancy, may as well shew the defect of it, when he is
confined to Verse: for he who has judgement, will avoid errors; and he
who has it not will commit them in all kinds of writing.'

"This argument, as you have taken it from a most acute person, so I
confess it carries much weight in it. But by using the word Judgement
here indefinitely, you seem to have put a fallacy upon us. I grant he who
has judgement, that is, so profound, so strong, so infallible a judgement
that he needs no helps to keep it always poised and upright, will commit
no faults; either in Rhyme, or out of it: and, on the other extreme, he
who has a judgement so weak and crazed, that no helps can correct or
amend it, shall write scurvily out of Rhyme; and worse in it. But the
first of these Judgements, is nowhere to be found; and the latter is not
fit to write at all.

"To speak, therefore, of Judgement as it is in the best Poets; they who
have the greatest proportion of it, want other helps than from it within:
as, for example, you would be loath to say that he who w