This is that which makes them say, rhyme is not natural; it
being only so, when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words,
or places them, for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would in
ordinary speaking; but when it is so judiciously ordered, that the
first word in the verse seems to beget the second, and that the next,
till that becomes the last word in the line, which, in the negligence
of prose, would be so; it must then be granted, rhyme has all the
advantages of prose, besides its own. But the excellence and dignity
of it were never fully known till Mr Waller taught it; he first made
writing easily an art; first shewed us to conclude the sense, most
commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs
on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to
overtake it. This sweetness of Mr Waller's lyric poesy was afterwards
followed in the epic by Sir John Denham, in his Cooper's-Hill, a poem
which, your Lordship knows, for the majesty of the style, is, and
ever will be, the exact standard of good writing. But if we owe the
invention of it to Mr Waller, we are acknowledging for the noblest use
of it to Sir William D'Avenant, who at once brought it upon the stage,
and made it perfect, in the Siege of Rhodes.
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