ney. Denham and Waller he held the first reformers of
English numbers; and thought that if Waller could have obtained the
strength of Denham, or Denham the sweetness of Waller, there had been
nothing wanting to complete a poet. He often expressed his commiseration
of Dryden's poverty, and his indignation at the age which suffered him
to write for bread; he repeated with rapture the first lines of All for
Love, but wondered at the corruption of taste which could bear any thing
so unnatural as rhyming tragedies.

In Otway he found uncommon powers of moving the passions, but was
disgusted by his general negligence, and blamed him for making a
conspirator his hero; and never concluded his disquisition, without
remarking how happily the sound of the clock is made to alarm the
audience. Southern would have been his favourite, but that he mixes
comick with tragick scenes, intercepts the natural course of the
passions, and fills the mind with a wild confusion of mirth and
melancholy. The versification of Rowe he thought too melodious for the
stage, and too little varied in different passions. He made it the great
fault of Congreve, that all his persons were wits, and that he always
wrote with more art than nature. He considered Cato rather as a poem
than a play, and allowed Addison to be the complete master of allegory
and grave humour, but paid no great deference to him as a critick. He
thought the chief merit of Prior was in his easy tales and lighter
poems, though he allowed that his Solomon had many noble sentiments
elegantly expressed. In Swift he discovered an inimitable vein of irony,
and an easiness which all would hope and few would attain. Pope he was
inclined to degrade from a poet to a versifier, and thought his numbers
rather luscious than sweet. He often lamented the neglect of Phaedra and
Hippolytus, and wished to see the stage under better regulations.

These assertions passed commonly uncontradicted; and if now and then an
opponent started up, he was quickly repressed by the suffrages of the
company, and Minim went away from every dispute with elation of heart
and increase of confidence.

He now grew conscious of his abilities, and began to talk of the present
state of dramatick poetry; wondered what had become of the comick genius
which supplied our ancestors with wit and pleasantry, and why no writer
could be found that durst now venture beyond a farce. He saw no reason
for thinking that the vein of humour