"First. Give me leave, Sir, to remember you! that the argument on which you raised this objection was only secondary. It was built upon the hypothesis, that to write in Verse was proper for serious Plays. Which supposition being granted (as it was briefly made out in that discourse, by shewing how Verse might be made _natural_): it asserted that this way of writing was a help to the Poet's judgement, by putting bounds to a wild, overflowing Fancy. I think therefore it will not be hard for me to make good what it was to prove. "But you add, that, 'Were this let pass; yet he who wants judgement in the liberty of the Fancy, may as well shew the defect of it, when he is confined to Verse: for he who has judgement, will avoid errors; and he who has it not will commit them in all kinds of writing.' "This argument, as you have taken it from a most acute person, so I confess it carries much weight in it. But by using the word Judgement here indefinitely, you seem to have put a fallacy upon us. I grant he who has judgement, that is, so profound, so strong, so infallible a judgement that he needs no helps to keep it always poised and upright, will commit no faults; either in Rhyme, or out of it: and, on the other extreme, he who has a judgement so weak and crazed, that no helps can correct or amend it, shall write scurvily out of Rhyme; and worse in it. But the first of these Judgements, is nowhere to be found; and the latter is not fit to write at all. "To speak, therefore, of Judgement as it is in the best Poets; they who have the greatest proportion of it, want other helps than from it within: as, for example, you would be loath to say that he who was endued with a sound judgement, had no need of history, geography, or moral philosophy, to write correctly. "Judgement is, indeed, the Master Workman in a Play; but he requires many subordinate hands, many tools to his assistance. And Verse, I affirm to be one of these. 'Tis a 'Rule and Line' by which he keeps his building compact and even; which, otherwise, lawless Imagination would raise, either irregularly or loosely. At least, if the Poet commits errors with this help; he would make greater and more without it. 'Tis, in short, a slow and painful, but the surest kind of working. "OVID, whom you accuse [p. 561] for luxuriancy in Verse, had, perhaps, been farther guilty of it, had he writ in Prose. And for your instance of BEN. JOHNSON [p. 561]; who, you say, writ exactly, without the help of Rhyme: you are to remember, 'tis only an aid to a _luxuriant_ Fancy; which his was not [p. 551]. As he did not want Imagination; so, none ever said he had much to spare. Neither was Verse then refined so much, to be a help to that Age as it is to ours.