etend to reason
can be pleased with one line always ending like another; tells how
unjustly and unnaturally sense is sacrificed to sound; how often the
best thoughts are mangled by the necessity of confining or extending
them to the dimensions of a couplet; and rejoices that genius has, in
our days, shaken off the shackles which had encumbered it so long. Yet
he allows that rhyme may sometimes be borne, if the lines be often
broken, and the pauses judiciously diversified.

From blank verse he makes an easy transition to Milton, whom he produces
as an example of the slow advance of lasting reputation. Milton is the
only writer in whose books Minim can read for ever without weariness.
What cause it is that exempts this pleasure from satiety he has long and
diligently inquired, and believes it to consist in the perpetual
variation of the numbers, by which the ear is gratified and the
attention awakened. The lines that are commonly thought rugged and
unmusical, he conceives to have been written to temper the melodious
luxury of the rest, or to express things by a proper cadence: for he
scarcely finds a verse that has not this favourite beauty; he declares
that he could shiver in a hot-house when he reads that

"the ground
Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of fire;"

and that, when Milton bewails his blindness, the verse,

"So thick a drop serene has quench'd these orbs,"

has, he knows not how, something that strikes him with an obscure
sensation like that which he fancies would be felt from the sound of
darkness.

Minim is not so confident of his rules of judgment as not very eagerly
to catch new light from the name of the author. He is commonly so
prudent as to spare those whom he cannot resist, unless, as will
sometimes happen, he finds the publick combined against them. But a
fresh pretender to fame he is strongly inclined to censure, till his own
honour requires that he commend him. Till he knows the success of a
composition, he intrenches himself in general terms; there are some new
thoughts and beautiful passages, but there is likewise much which he
would have advised the author to expunge. He has several favourite
epithets, of which he has never settled the meaning, but which are very
commodiously applied to books which he has not read, or cannot
understand. One is _manly_, another is _dry_, another _stiff_, and
another _flimsy_; sometimes he discovers delicacy of style, and
sometimes meets wit