r to say:

I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success
to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your
sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do
no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content
your wishes to the full.

Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the
writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting
them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the
sentences each before the other.

With kindness I your prayers receive,
And to your hopes success will give.
I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;
Which they shall do no more.
For their idolatry I'll so resent,
As shall your wishes to the full content!!

This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the
words, 'How do you find yourself?' 'Very well, I thank you'; but to
hold them inspired, if altered into

Yourself how do you find?
Very well, you I thank.

It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these
inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was
concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the
classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial
Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or
Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first
sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in
other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always
written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear
Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what
is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in
one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal
character of the Duke of Buckingham:

A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,
_Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
_Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._
_Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ
_With something new to wish or to enjoy!_
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to sho