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 sake, so unnaturally as no man would in ordinary speaking; but when it is 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 the 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 shewed us 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.  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.

[Footnote 1:  The tragedy of Ferrex and Perrex (which is the proper title) was written by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, a barrister at law.  In Sackville’s part of the play, which comprehends the two last acts, there is some poetry worthy of the author of the sublime Introduction to the Mirror of Magistrates.  While both the authors were out of England, one William Griffiths published a spurious copy, under the title of Gorboduc, the name of one of the principal personages, who is not, however, queen, but king, of England, But, what was a wider mistake, considering Dryden’s purpose of mentioning the work, it is not written in rhyme, but in blank verse, excepting the choruses, which are in stanzas of six lines.  The name of the queen is Videna.  Sir Philip Sydney says, “Gorboduc is full of stately speeches and well sounding phrases, climbing up to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and thereby obtain the very end of poetry.”]

[Footnote A:  This is a mistake.  Marlow, and several other dramatic authors, used blank verse before the days of Shakspeare.]

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