The world shall know it-is an unmeaning ex pression, and a poor expletive, into which our poet was forced by the rhyme.* Maudit soit le premier, dont la verve insensée, Rhyme also could alone be the occasion of the following faulty expressions, taken too from some of his most finished pieces: Not Cæsar's Empress would I deign to prove- Nay, *La Rime gêne plus qu'elle n' orne les vers. Elle les charge d'Epithétes; elle rend souvent la diction forcée, & pleine d'une vaine parure. En allongant les discours, elle les affoiblit. Souvent ou a recours à un vers inutile, pour en amener un bon. FENELON to M. DE LA MOTTE. Lettres, p. 62. A Cambray, 26 Janvier, 1719. † Boileau. Sat. 2. v. 53. Nay, half in heav'n except what's mighty odd can have no flaw on such a world we fall take scandal at a spark do the knack, and do the feat And more instances might be added, if it were not disagreeable to observe these straws in amber. But if rhyme occasions such inconveniencies and improprieties in so exact a writer as our author, what can be expected from inferior versifiers ?* It is not my intention to enter into a trite and tedious discussion of the several merits of rhyme and blank verse. haps rhyme may be properest for shorter pieces; for lyric, elegiac, and satiric poems; for pieces where closeness of expression, and smartness of style, L S Per * Our author told Mr. HARTE, that, in order to disguise his being the author of the second epistle of the Essay on Man, he made, in the first edition, the following bad rhyme : A cheat! a whore! who starts not at the name, In all the inns of court, or Drury-Lane ?* And HARTE remembered to have often heard it urged, in enquiries about the author, whilst he was unknown, that it was impossible it could be POPE's, on account of this very POPE inserted many good lines in Harte's Essay on passage. Reason. * Ver. 205. style, are expected: but for subjects of a higher order, where any enthusiasm or emotion is to be expressed, or for poems of a greater length, blank verse is undoubtedly preferable. An epic poem in rhyme appears to be such a sort of thing, as the Eneid would have been if it had been written, like Ovid's Fasti, in hexameter and pentamer verses; and the reading it would have been as tedious as the travelling through that one long, strait, avenue of firs, that leads from Moscow to Petersburgh. I will give the reader Mr. POPE's own opinion on this subject, and in his own words, as delivered to Mr. Spence: "I have nothing to say for rhyme ;* but that I doubt if * Boileau, whose practice it was to make the second line of a couplet before the first, having written (in his second satire) this line, Dans mes vers recousus mettre en pieces Malherbe, it was thought impossible by La Fontaine and Moliere, and other critical friends, for him to find a proper rhyme for the word Malherbe: at last he hit upon the following; Et transposant cent fois & le nom & le verbe. Upon shewing which line to La Fontaine, he cried out, “Ah! how happy have you been, my friend! I would give the very best if a poem can support itself without it in our lan guage, unless it be stiffened with such strange words as are likely to destroy our language itself. The high style that is affected so much in blank verse, would not have been supported even in Milton, had not his subject turned so much on such strange and out of the world things as-it does."* May we not, however, venture to ob. serve, that more of that true harmony which will best support a poem, will result from a variety of pauses, and from an intermixture of those different feet (iambic and trochaïc particularly) into which our language naturally falls, than from the uniformity of similar terminations 2 "There L 4 best of all my Tales to have made such a discovery." So important in the eyes of the French poets is a lucky rhyme! Voltaire gives us the following anecdote. Questions sur l'Encycloped. Partie 5, 255 page. "Je me souviendrai toûjours que je demandai au célébre POPE, pourquoi Milton n'avait pas rimé son Paradis perdu ; & qu'il me répondit, Because he could not; parce qu'il ne le pouvait pas."-But the most harmonious of rhymers has said, "What rhyme adds to sweetness, it takes away from sense." DRYDEN.-The rhymes in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are just and correct. * But there are many passages in Milton of the most flowing softness and smoothness, without any marks of this high style, any hard or antiquated words, or harsh inversions, which are by no means essential to blank verse. "There can be no music," says COWLEY, "with only one note." 17. Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! Gold, imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things, Or ship off Senates to a distant shore; Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow; "Not one of my works (said POPE to Mr. Spence) was more laboured than my Epistle on the Use of Riches." It does, indeed, abound in knowledge of life, and in the justest satire. The lines above quoted, have also the additional merit of touching on a subject that never occurred to former satirists. And though it was difficult to say any thing new about avarice, "a vice that has been so pelted (says CowLEY) with good sentences," yet has our author done it so success fully, *The word flits heightens the satire, by giving us the strong idea of an obscene and ill-omened bird. + Of the Use of Riches, v. 39. |