lank verse is
so childishly easy and expeditious (hence, by the way, Shakespear's
copious output), that by adopting it I was enabled to do within the week
what would have cost me a month in prose.

Besides, I am fond of blank verse. Not nineteenth century blank verse,
of course, nor indeed, with a very few exceptions, any post-Shakespearean
blank verse. Nay, not Shakespearean blank verse itself later than the
histories. When an author can write the prose dialogue of the first
scene in As You Like It, or Hamlet's colloquies with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, there is really no excuse for The Seven Ages and "To be or
not to be," except the excuse of a haste that made great facility
indispensable. I am quite sure that any one who is to recover the charm
of blank verse must frankly go back to its beginnings and start a
literary pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I like the melodious sing-song, the
clear simple one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed
tags, like the half closes in an eighteenth century symphony, in Peele,
Kyd, Greene, and the histories of Shakespear. How any one with music in
him can turn from Henry VI., John, and the two Richards to such a mess
of verse half developed into rhetorical prose as Cymbeline, is to me
explicable only by the uncivil hypothesis that the artistic qualities in
the Elizabethan drama do not exist for most of its critics; so that they
hang on to its purely prosaic content, and hypnotize themselves into
absurd exaggerations of the value of that content. Even poets fall under
the spell. Ben Jonson described Marlowe's line as "mighty"! As well put
Michael Angelo's epitaph on the tombstone of Paolo Uccello. No wonder
Jonson's blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in
literature, and indicates his most prosaic mood as surely as his shorter
rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood. Marlowe never wrote a mighty
line in his life: Cowper's single phrase, "Toll for the brave," drowns
all his mightinesses as Great Tom drowns a military band. But Marlowe
took that very pleasant-sounding rigmarole of Peele and Greene, and
added to its sunny daylight the insane splendors of night, and the cheap
tragedy of crime. Because he had only a common sort of brain, he was
hopelessly beaten by Shakespear; but he had a fine ear and a soaring
spirit: in short, one does not forget "wanton Arethusa's azure arms"
and the like. But the pleasant-sounding rigmarole was the basis of the
whole thi