hymed sound, or in other words that the full stop should be always at
the end of the couplet. To keep the rhyme predominant there was an
increasing tendency to have at least the pause of a comma, even after
the final word of the first line of the couplet. Thus from a license,
which, as Prior says, "was found too dissolute and wild, and came very
often too near prose," the writers of heroics arrived at a system which
"produced too frequent an identity in the sound, and brought every
couplet to the point of an epigram."[34] Denham, according to Johnson,
was the chief reformer who "taught his followers the art of concluding
their sense in couplets,"[35] but he retained much of the primitive
freedom, and Prior says that to Dryden belongs the credit of perfecting
the innovation, and the blame of pushing it to excess. Pope went further
than Dryden. When once the change had commenced there was a constant
movement towards uniformity till the utmost verge was reached, and a
fresh reaction began. Bowles, with his fine ear, was a zealous advocate
for diversified harmony, and tuneful strength. He felt that an
occasional break, managed with skill, adds dignity to the couplet, while
the toning down of the final syllables, by sometimes running one verse
into another, is a grateful antidote to the cloying monotony of emphatic
rhymes. Imperfect rhymes offend from the impression they give of
imperfect art, but perfect rhymes softened by the continuous flow of the
pronunciation, are a relief to the ear. As the rhymed sound should be
diminished at intervals, so, at intervals, it may be advantageously
increased by the introduction of triplets. Dryden often used them with
admirable effect;[36] Pope employed them sparingly, and they were almost
entirely laid aside by his immediate imitators. With them the taste for
numerous verse was extinct.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Johnson was mistaken. Pope states in a note that the
addition commenced at ver. 291.]

[Footnote 2:

When actions, unadorned, are faint and weak,
Cities and countries must be taught to speak;
Gods may descend in factions from the skies,
And rivers from their oozy beds arise.]

[Footnote 3: "Denham," says Johnson, "seems to have been, at least among
us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated
_local poetry_, of which the fundamental subject is some particular
landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such
embellishme