I know some, who, if they were to write in Blank Verse Sir, I ask your pardon! would think it sounded more heroically to write

    Sir, I, your pardon ask!

I should judge him to have little command of English, whom the necessity of a rhyme should force upon this rock; though, sometimes, it cannot be easily avoided.

And, indeed, this is the only inconvenience with which Rhyme can be charged.  This is that, which makes them say, “Rhyme is not natural.  It being only so, when the Poet either makes a vicious choice of words; or places them, for Rhyme’s sake so unnaturally, as no man would, in ordinary speaking.”  But when ’tis so judiciously ordered, that the first word in the verse seems to beget the second; and that, the next; till that becomes the last word in the line, which, in the negligence of Prose, would be so:  it must, then, be granted, Rhyme has all advantages of Prose, besides its own.

But the excellence and dignity of it, were never fully known, till Mr. WALLER taught it.  He, first, made writing easily, an Art:  first, showed us to conclude the Sense, most commonly in distiches; 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.

This sweetness of Mr. WALLER’s Lyric Poesy was, afterwards, followed in the Epic, by Sir JOHN DENHAM, in his Cooper’s Hill; a Poem which, your Lordship knows! for the majesty of the style, is, and ever will be the Exact Standard of Good Writing.

But if we owe the invention of it to Mr. WALLER; we are acknowledging for the noblest use of it, to Sir WILLIAM D’AVENANT; who, at once, brought it upon the Stage, and made it perfect in The Siege of Rhodes.

The advantages which Rhyme has over Blank Verse, are so many that it were lost time to name them.

Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, in his Defence of Poesy, gives us one, which, in my opinion, is not the least considerable:  I mean, the Help it brings to Memory; which Rhyme so knits up by the Affinity of Sounds, that by remembering the last word in one line, we often call to mind both the verses.

Then, in the Quickness of Repartees, which in Discoursive Scenes fall very often:  it has so particular a grace, and is so aptly suited to them, that the Sudden Smartness of the Answer, and the Sweetness of the Rhyme set off the beauty of each other.

But that benefit, which I consider most in it, because I have not seldom found it, is that it Bounds and Circumscribes the Fancy.  For Imagination in a Poet, is a faculty so wild and lawless, that, like a high ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the Judgement.  The great easiness of Blank Verse renders the Poet too luxuriant.  He is tempted to say many things, which might better be omitted, or, at least, shut up in fewer words.

But when the difficulty of artful Rhyming is interposed, where the Poet commonly confines his Sense to his Couplet; and must contrive that Sense into such words that the Rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the Rhyme [pp. 571 581]:  the Fancy then gives leisure to the Judgement to come in; which, seeing so heavy a tax imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses.