But
in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for
unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into
affectation--a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I
justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the
example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians who have used it; for,
whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have
not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is
plainly this--that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease
of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest in his
"Juvenilia" or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is
always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost
every man a rhymer, though not a poet.
By this time, my lord, I doubt not but that you wonder why I have
run off from my bias so long together, and made so tedious a
digression from satire to heroic poetry; but if you will not excuse
it by the tattling quality of age (which, as Sir William Davenant
says, is always narrative), yet I hope the usefulness of what I have
to say on this subject will qualify the remoteness of it; and this
is the last time I will commit the crime of prefaces, or trouble the
world with my notions of anything that relates to verse.
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