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500 had been written in rhyming heroic couplet; "The variety of pauses," he says, "so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer." But then turn to his criticism on those poets whose theory of poetry agreed with his own—such as Pope and Dryden—and you will find that it is excellent; so just, so acute, and so discriminating that it will always repay study. And even when his criticism of a writer is unfavourably biased—as it is in the case of Swift—he sometimes ends by laying his finger on some distinctive merit; as when, in concluding his estimate of Swift, he says, "perhaps no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so little, or that, in all his excellencies and all his defects, has so well maintained his claim to be considered original." His judgments on Shakespeare sometimes seem to us inadequate; but it would be hard to find a more penetrating criticism on Shakespeare's prose dialogue than is contained in the following passage—one less known than it deserves to be. He has just been saying that every nation has a style of its own which never dies out—a mode of speech so native to the language that it survives all changes of fashion; and this lives on in the mouths of the people. "The polite," he continues, "are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness