With kindness I your prayers receive, And to your hopes success will give. I have, with anger, seen mankind adore Your sister’s beauty and her scorn deplore; Which they shall do no more. For their idolatry I’ll so resent, As shall your wishes to the full content!! This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the words, ‘How do you find yourself?’ ‘Very well, I thank you’; but to hold them inspired, if altered into Yourself how do you find? Very well, you I thank. It is true, the best writers in Shadwell’s age were addicted to these inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear Shadwell’s antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character of the Duke of Buckingham: A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_, _Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_ But in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon: Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking, _Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._ _Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ _With something new to wish or to enjoy!_ Railing and praising were his usual themes; And both, to show his judgement, in extremes: So over violent, or over civil, _That every man with him was god or devil._ In squandering wealth was his peculiar art; _Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._ Beggar’d by fools, whom still he found too late, _He had his jest, and they had his estate._ Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to throw at another’s head, where a less confident foot would have stumbled over it. Such is Dryden’s use of the word _might_--the mere sign of a tense--in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of rising to sing psalms in the night.