at of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but
it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words
were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser,
as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master
may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet,
in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when
either they are more sounding or more significant than those in
practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other
words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace,
for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is
to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well
as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided
on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse,
though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other
Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the
abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,)
his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his
talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it;
which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth,
where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly
from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of
love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."

The general effect of this captious passage is far from pleasant. It
leaves us in doubt of the sincerity of Courts, and Towns, and Dryden's
admiration of Mr Milton. "His subject is not that of a heroic poem,
properly so called." Milton did not call it a heroic poem. But it is an
epic poem, and a divine. "The event is not prosperous." Assuredly not. For
that matter, neither, to our minds, is that of the Iliad. It seems not a
little unreasonable to complain that in Paradise Lost, the "human persons
are but two." Dryden "will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands, who
has promised us a critique on that author;" and he hopes Mr Rhymer _will
grant_ so and so--look pray again at what Dryden hopes Mr Rhymer will
grant to Mr Milton. Mr Rhymer had promised to favour the public "with some
reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton, which some are pleased to
call a poem." But