IN PARADISUM AMISSAM SUMMI POETAE JOHANNIS QU MILTONI. UI legis Amiffam Paradifum, grandia magni Et tamen haec hodie terra Britanna legit. Quantus Quantus in aethereis tollit fe Lucifer armis! Et currus animes, armaque digna Deo, Et flammae vibrant, et vera tonitrua rauco Excidit attonitis mens omnis, et impetus omnis, Cedite Romani Scriptores, cedite Graï, Et quos fama recens vel celebravit anus. Haec quicunque leget tantùm ceciniffe putabit Maeonidem ranas, Virgilium culices. SAMUEL BARROW, M. D. On W HEN I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold, The facred truths to fable and old song, Yet as I read, foon growing less severe, Through that wide field how he his way should find, Might hence prefume the whole creation's day My causeless, yet not impious, furmise. Thou haft not miss'd one thought that could be fit, And So that no room is here for writers left, That majesty which through thy work doth reign, Draws the devout, deterring the profane. And things divine thou treat'st of in such state At once delight and horror on us seise, Where couldst thou words of fuch a compass find? Well might'ft thou scorn thy readers to allure With tinkling rime, of thy own sense secure; While the Town-Bays writes all the while and spells, And like a pack-horse tires without his bells: Their fancies like our bushy-points appear, The poets tag them, we for fashion wear. I too transported by the mode Commend, In number, weight, and measure, needs not rime. ANDREW MARVEL. THE T HE meafure is English heroic verfe without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no neceffary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verfe, in longer works eSpecially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to fet off wretched matter and lame meter; grac'd indeed fince by the ufe of fome famous modern poets, carried away by cuftom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwife, and for the most part worse than elfe they would have exprefs'd them. Not without caufe therefore fome both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note, have rejected rime both in longer and fhorter works, as have alfo long fince our beft English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true mufical delight; which confifts only in apt numbers, fit quantity of fyllables, and the fenfe variously drawn out from one verfe into another, not in the jingling found of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned Ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rime fo little is to be taken for a defect, though it may feem fo perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be efteemed an example fet, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem, from the troublefome and modern bondage of riming. THE |