Page:Virgil's Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis - Dryden (1709) - volume 1.pdf/110

 exceedingly difficult, that he quitted it, and left the Honour of that part to Theocritus''. It is indeed probable, that what we improperly call Rhyme, is the most ancient sort of Poetry; and Learned Men have given good Arguments for it; and therefore a French Historian commits a gross mistake, when he attributes that Invention to a King of Gaul, as an English Gentleman does, when he makes a Roman Emperour the Inventor of it. But the Greeks, who understood fully the force and power of Numbers, soon grew weary of this Childish sort of Verse, as the Younger Vossius justly calls it, and therefore those rhyming Hexameters, which Plutarch observes in Homer himself, seem to be the Remains of a barbarous Age. Virgil had them in such abhorrence, that he would rather make a false Syntax, than what we call a Rhyme, such a Verse as this''

was passable in Ovid, but the nice Ears in Augustus his Court could not pardon Virgil, for

So that the principal Ornament of Modern Poetry, was accounted deformity by the Latins, and Greeks; it was they who invented the different terminations of words, those happy compositions, those short Monosyllables, those