COMMENDATORY VERSES PREFIXED TO THE SECOND EDITION. IN PARADISUM AMISSAM SUMMI POETÆ JOHANNIS MILTONI. QUI legis Amissam Paradisum, grandia magni Et sine fine magis, si quid magis est sine fine, Quantus in ætheriis tollit se Lucifer armis, Dum ferus hic stellas protegit, ille rapit! Et flammæ vibrant, et vera tonitrua rauco Excidit attonitis mens omnis, et impetus omnis, Ad pœnas fugiunt, et, ceu foret Orcus asylum, Cedite, Romani Scriptores; cedite, Graii; Et quos fama recens vel celebravit anus : Hæc quicunque leget tantum cecinisse putabit Mæonidem ranas, Virgilium culices. S. B., M.D. ON PARADISE LOST WHEN I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold, The sacred truths to fable and old song Yet, as I read, soon growing less severe, I liked his project, the success did fear— Or, if a work so infinite he spanned, Might hence presume the whole Creation's day Thou hast not missed one thought that could be fit, So that no room is here for writers left, But to detect their ignorance or theft. The majesty which through thy work doth reign Draws the devout, deterring the profane. And things divine thou treat'st of in such state At once delight and horror on us seize; And above human flight dost soar aloft So never flags, but always keeps on wing. Where could'st thou words of such a compass find? Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind? Just Heaven, thee like Tiresias to requite, Well might'st thou scorn thy readers to allure With tinkling rime, of thy own sense secure ; While the Town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, And, like a pack-horse, tires without his bells. The poets tag them, we for fashion wear. I too, transported by the mode, offend, And, while I meant to praise thee, must commend. In number, weight, and measure, needs not rime. A. M. THE VERSE THE measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin,—rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre ; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings,—a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming. |