Elsewhere he
expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on
subjects of a dignified kind.[16]

"It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their
advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect.
If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be
granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the
irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their
fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,'
the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be
allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to
rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of
the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what
uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . .
Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that
timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the
dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and
systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the
sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not
diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to
the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models,
from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared,
succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass
those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting,
though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a
"sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman
sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of
Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness
has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more
phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his
journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of
the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard."

This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the
subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and
the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against
Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The
language