syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below so great a master to
make use of such a little instrument. But his good sense is
perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the
time of finding faults: we pass through the levity of his rhyme,
and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought.
After all, he has chosen this kind of verse, and has written the
best in it, and had he taken another he would always have excelled;
as we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he
still makes it uppermost and most beneficial to himself.

The quickness of your imagination, my lord, has already prevented
me; and you know beforehand that I would prefer the verse of ten
syllables, which we call the English heroic, to that of eight. This
is truly my opinion, for this sort of number is more roomy; the
thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. When
the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straitens the expression; we
are thinking of the close when we should be employed in adorning the
thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space too narrow
for his imagination; he loses many beauties without gaining one
advantage. For a burlesque rhyme I have already concluded to be
none; or, if it were, it is more easily purchased in ten syllables
than in eight. In both occasions it is as in a tennis-court, when
the strokes of greater force are given, when we strike out and play
at length. Tassoni and Boileau have left us the best examples of
this way in the "Seechia Rapita" and the "Lutrin," and next them
Merlin Cocaius in his "Baldus." I will speak only of the two
former, because the last is written in Latin verse. The "Secchia
Rapita" is an Italian poem, a satire of the Varronian kind. It is
written in the stanza of eight, which is their measure for heroic
verse. The words are stately, the numbers smooth; the turn both of