DRYDEN. 309 



You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with 

 your middle-finger.&quot;* It seems to have been taken for 

 granted by Waller, as afterwards by Dryden, that our 

 elder poets bestowed no thought upon their verse. &quot; Waller 

 was smooth/ but unhappily he was also flat, and his im 

 portation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of 

 thought-coop did nothing but mischief, t He never com 

 passed even a smoothness approaching this description of a 

 nightingale s song by a third-rate poet of the earlier school, 



&quot; Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note 

 Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 

 A clear, unwrinkled song,&quot; 



one of whose beauties is its running over into the third 

 verse. Those poets indeed 



&quot; Felt music s pulse in all her arteries ; &quot; 



and Dryden himself found out, when he came to try it, that 

 blank verse was not so easy a thing as he at first conceived 

 it, nay, that it is the most difficult of all verse, and that it 

 must make up in harmony, by variety of pause and modula 

 tion, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. In what 

 makes the chief merit of his later versification, he but 

 rediscovered the secret of his predecessors in giving to 

 rhymed pentameters something of the freedom of blank 

 verse, and not mistaking metre for rhythm. 



Yoltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, has sufficiently 

 lamented the awkwardness of movement imposed upon the 

 French dramatists by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers 



* Discoveries. 



t What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his alteration 

 of the &quot;Maid s Tragedy &quot; of Beaumont and Fletcher : 



&quot; Not long since walking in the field, 

 My nurse and I, we there beheld 

 A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, 

 I would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, 

 Whoever eat those berries, cried, 

 In less than half-an-hour died ! &quot; 



What intolerable seesaw ! Not much of Byron s &quot; fatal facility &quot; in 

 these octosyllabics 1 



