that the next,
till that becomes the last word in the line, which, in the negligence
of prose, would be so; it must then be granted, rhyme has all the
advantages of prose, besides its own. But the excellence and dignity
of it were never fully known till Mr Waller taught it; he first made
writing easily an art; first shewed us to conclude the sense, most
commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs
on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to
overtake it. This sweetness of Mr Waller's lyric poesy was afterwards
followed in the epic by Sir John Denham, in his Cooper's-Hill, a poem
which, your Lordship knows, for the majesty of the style, is, and
ever will be, the exact standard of good writing. But if we owe the
invention of it to Mr Waller, we are acknowledging for the noblest use
of it to Sir William D'Avenant, who at once brought it upon the stage,
and made it perfect, in the Siege of Rhodes.

[Footnote 1: The tragedy of Ferrex and Perrex (which is the proper
title) was written by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards
earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, a barrister at law. In Sackville's
part of the play, which comprehends the two last acts, there is some
poetry worthy of the author of the sublime Introduction to the Mirror
of Magistrates. While both the authors were out of England, one
William Griffiths published a spurious copy, under the title of
Gorboduc, the name of one of the principal personages, who is not,
however, _queen_, but _king_, of England, But, what was a
wider mistake, considering Dryden's purpose of mentioning the work, it
is not written in rhyme, but in blank verse, excepting the choruses,
which are in stanzas of six lines. The name of the queen is Videna.
Sir Philip Sydney says, "Gorboduc is full of stately speeches and well
sounding phrases, climbing up to the height of Seneca his style, and
as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach,
and thereby obtain the very end of poetry."]

[Footnote A: This is a mistake. Marlow, and several other dramatic
authors, used blank verse before the days of Shakspeare.]

The advantages which rhyme has over blank verse are so many, that
it were lost time to name them. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence
of Poesy, gives us one, which, in my opinion, is not the least
considerable; I mean the help it brings to memory, which rhyme so
knits up, by the affinity of sounds, that, by remembering the