This
is truly my opinion, for this sort of number is more roomy; the
thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When
the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straitens the expression; we
are thinking of the close when we should be employed in adorning the
thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow
for his imagination; he loses many beauties without gaining one
advantage. For a burlesque rhyme I have already concluded to be
none; or, if it were, it is more easily purchased in ten syllables
than in eight. In both occasions it is as in a tennis-court, when
the strokes of greater force are given, when we strike out and play
at length. Tassoni and Boileau have left us the best examples of
this way in the "Seechia Rapita" and the "Lutrin," and next them
Merlin Cocaius in his "Baldus." I will speak only of the two
former, because the last is written in Latin verse. The "Secchia
Rapita" is an Italian poem, a satire of the Varronian kind. It is
written in the stanza of eight, which is their measure for heroic
verse.
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