"Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen.
You doubt?--See Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick's Dean.[8]
"Blank verse is now with one consent allied
To Tragedy, and rarely quits her side;
Though mad Almanzor rhymed in Dryden's days,
No sing-song hero rants in modern plays;--
While modest Comedy her verse foregoes
For jest and pun in very middling prose.
Not that our Bens or Beaumonts show the worse,
Or lose one point because they wrote in verse;
But so Thalia pleases to appear,--
Poor virgin!--damn'd some twenty times a year!"
There is more of poetry in the following verses upon Milton than in any
other passage throughout the Paraphrase:--
"'Awake a louder and a loftier strain,'
And, pray, what follows from his boiling brain?
He sinks to S * *'s level in a trice,
Whose epic mountains never fail in mice!
Not so of yore awoke your mighty sire
The tempered warblings of his master lyre;
Soft as the gentler breathing of the lute,
'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit'
He speaks; but, as his subject swells along,
Earth, Heaven, and Hades, echo with the song."