446 aMISCELLAN EOti6 THOUGHTS. help of devout poesy, give too much encouragement to this art, to have it for ever forbidden to christians. Besides, if verse were but a mere recreation, may not a life devoted to divine offices be indulged in some sort of amusements in this animal and feeble state, to divert a heavy hour, and re. lieve the mind a little, when fatigued with intense labours of a superior kind? Was the character of that spiritual man, the Archbishop of Cambray, ever thought to be tarnished by his epistolary converse with De la Motte the French poet, on such subjects as these ? Go home, Censorio, and subdue your snarl- ing humour; or learn to employ your reproofs with more justice. For my part, I will proceed to gratify myself in reading" the next four or five pages too; though I find by the title, that the argument is much the same. LXXII. Of the different Stops and Cadences in Blank Verse. Mr. Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us: he has given us a noble example of it in his incom- parable poem called Paradise Lost, and has recommended it to the world in his preface. There he assures us, " that true mu- sical delight does not consist in rhyme, or the jingling sound of like endings, but Only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." Yet however the sentence be often prolonged beyond the end of the line, this does by no means imply that no verse should have a period at the end of it, for that would be running outof one ex- treme into another, and by avoiding one error to fall into a worse ; as I shall make appear in what follows : Where rhyme is used, there has too generally been placed a colon or a period at the end Of every couplet, though without necessity ; and thus the whole poem usually runs on in the same pace, with such a perpetual return of the same sort of numbers and the same cadences and pauses, that the constant uniformity has grown tiresome and offensive to every musical ear, and is contrary to the rules of true harmony ; according to that known remark of Horace, " Ridetnr chordâ qui semper oberrat eâdem." But it does not follow from this observation, that blank verse should abandon all colons and periods at the end of the lines; but only that they should be disposed of with care and judgment in a greater variety through several parts of the line, as well as at the end of it. This will assist the poet in forming, true harmony, and in making his different numbers, and the dif- ferent cadences of the verse, appear more various and grateful: It will constrain the reader to give different rests to his voice ; and thus take away that dull uniformity of sound which too often everspreads a poem writ in rhyme.
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