Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/103

Rh may write better in verse, but not more naturally. Neither is it able to evince that; for he who wants judgment to confine his fancy in blank verse, may want it as much in rhyme: and he who has it will avoid errors in both kinds. Latin verse was as great a confinement to the imagination of those poets, as rhyme to ours; and yet you find Ovid saying too much on every subject. Nescivit (says Seneca) quod bene cessit relinquere n: of which he gives you one famous instance in his description of the deluge: Omnia pontus erat, deerant quoque litora ponto n. Now all was sea, nor had that sea a shore. Thus Ovid's fancy was not limited by verse, and Virgil needed not verse to have bounded his.

'In our own language we see Ben Johnson confining himself to what ought to be said, even in the liberty of blank verse; and yet Corneille, the most judicious of the French poets, is still varying the same sense an hundred ways, and dwelling eternally on the same subject, though confined by rhyme. Some other exceptions I have to verse; but since these I have named are for the most part already publick, I conceive it reasonable they should first be answered.' 'It concerns me less than any,' said Neander, (seeing he had ended,) 'to reply to this discourse; because when I should have proved that verse may be natural in plays, yet I should always be ready to confess, that those which I have written in this kind n come short of that perfection which is required. Yet Rh