DRYDEN. 307 



talk, and the fairness with which each side of the argument 

 is treated shows the breadth of Dryden s mind perhaps 

 better than any other one piece of his writing. There are 

 no men of straw set up to be knocked down again, as there 

 commonly are in debates conducted upon this plan. The 

 &quot; Defence &quot; of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to 

 Neander s share in it, as well as many scattered passages 

 in subsequent prefaces and dedications. All the inter 

 locutors agree that &quot;the sweetness of English verse was 

 never understood or practised by our fathers,&quot; and that 

 &quot; our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some 

 writers yet living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts 

 into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities 

 of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of 

 the verse that it should never mislead the sense, but itself 

 be led and governed by it.&quot; In another place he shows 

 that by &quot; living writers &quot; he meant Waller and Denham. 

 &quot; 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 showed us to conclude the sense, most 

 commonly in distiches, which in the verse before him runs 

 on for so many lines together that the reader is out of 

 breath to overtake it.&quot;* Dryden afterwards changed his 

 mind, and one of the excellences of his own rhymed verse 

 is, that his sense is too ample to be concluded by the 

 distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in 

 dialogue ; but Dryden replies that it is no more so 

 than blank verse, since no man talks any kind of 

 verse in real life. But the argument for rhyme is of 

 another kind. &quot; I am satisfied if it cause delight, for 

 delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy [he 

 should have said means] ; instruction can be admitted 

 but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it de 

 lights. . . . The converse, therefore, which a poet is to 

 imitate must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments 

 of poesy, and must be such as, strictly considered, could 

 * Dedication of &quot; Rival Ladies.&quot; 



