."[25] Dryden made some experiments in
tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the
prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic
intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French
manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage,
was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his
"heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the
ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward
he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank
verse in his later plays.

As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in
judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though
Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent
foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter,
Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious,
that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the
last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the
nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a
shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason
was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic
alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant
freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed
couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to
Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets
was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and
dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller
taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to
conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of
those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is
out of breath to overtake it."[27] All through the classical period the
tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the
first correct versifier. Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed
but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to
vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because,
by force of his example, he "made poetry a