We
thank him not for giving us that unseasonable delight, when we know
he could have given us a better and more solid. He might have left
that task to others who, not being able to put in thought, can only
makes us grin with the excrescence of a word of two or three
syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below so great a master to
make use of such a little instrument. But his good sense is
perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the
time of finding faults: we pass through the levity of his rhyme,
and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought.
After all, he has chosen this kind of verse, and has written the
best in it, and had he taken another he would always have excelled;
as we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he
still makes it uppermost and most beneficial to himself.
The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented
me; and you know beforehand that I would prefer the verse of ten
syllables, which we call the English heroic, to that of eight.
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