ot very favourable to imagination--Satire: set down
the character of Sporus, with all the wonderful play of fancy which
is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of
verses, from any two existing poets, of the same power and the same
variety--where will you find them?

"I merely mention one instance of many in reply to the injustice
done to the memory of him who harmonised our poetical language. The
attorneys clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to
distort themselves to the new models than to toil after the
symmetry of him who had enchanted their fathers. They were besides
smitten by being told that the new school were to revive the
language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the
reign of Queen Anne wrote no better than French, by a species of
literary treason.

"Blank verse, which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever
wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,--or else such
rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it. I am aware
that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that he could not
'prevail upon himself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer.' The
opinions of that truly great man, whom it is also the present
fashion to decry, will ever be received by me with that deference
which time will restore to him from all; but, with all humility, I
am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more
nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets,
although even _they_ could sustain the subject if well balanced,
but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of
Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our
language. The Seasons of Thomson would have been better in rhyme,
although still inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr.
Southey's Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six
months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also to the
lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate's odes by the
side of Dryden's on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read
_first_ those of Mr. Southey.

"To the heaven-born genii and inspired young scriveners of the day
much of this will appear paradox; it will appear so even to the
higher order of our critics; but it was a truis