of Aristotle.  He pronounced “Cato” “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius,” but acknowledge that its success had “introduced, or confirmed among us, the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill philosophy.”  On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed.  Addison praised old English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly commends[23] “the fairy way of writing,” a romantic foppery that Johnson despised.[24]

Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of Shakspere and Fletcher:  “The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought."[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