In the more nondescript kinds of poetry, however, the revolt against rhyme spread faster than in the epic. In descriptive and didactic poetry, if anywhere, rhyme might reasonably claim to hold its place. There is much to be said for the opinion that, in such subjects, rhyme is necessary to fix the wandering attention of the reader. Yet, for all that, the great efforts of the reflective muse during the next century were, with hardly an exception, in blank verse. It is enough to recall the _Seasons_ of Thomson, the discourses of Akenside and Armstrong, and the _Night Thoughts_ of the arch-moralist Young. [Footnote: It may be noted that Young's blank verse has constantly the run of the heroic couplet.] In the case of Young--as later in that of Cowper--this is the more remarkable, because his Satires show him to have had complete command of the mechanism of the heroic couplet. That he should have deliberately chosen the rival metre is proof--a proof which even the exquisite work of Goldsmith is not sufficient to gainsay--that, by the middle of the eighteenth century the heroic couplet had been virtually driven from every field of poetry, save that of satire. We may now turn to the second of the two themes with which Dryden is mainly occupied in the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. What are the conventional restrictions that surround the dramatist, and how far are they of binding force? That the drama is by nature a convention--more than this, a convention accepted largely with a view to the need of idealization--the men of Dryden's day were in no danger of forgetting. The peril with them was all the other way. The fashion of that age was to treat the arbitrary usages of the classical theatre as though they were binding for all time. Thus, of the four men who take part in the dialogue of the _Essay_, three are emphatically agreed in bowing down before the three unities as laws of nature. Dryden himself (Neander) is alone in questioning their divinity: a memorable proof of his critical independence; but one in which, as he maliciously points out, he was supported by the greatest of living dramatists. Corneille could not be suspected of any personal motive for undertaking the defence of dramatic license. Yet he closed his _Discourse of the Three Unities_ with the admission that he had "learnt by experience how much the French stage was constrained and bound up by the observance of these rules, and how many beauties it had sacrificed". [Footnote: Il est facile aux speculatifs d'etre severes; mais, s'ils voulaient donner dix ou douze poemes de cette nature au public, ils elargiraient peut-etre les regles encore plus que je ne sais, si tot qu'ils auraient reconnu par l'experience quelle contrainte apporte leur exactitude et combien de belles choses elle bannit de notre theatre--_Troisieme Discours Euvres_, xii. 326. See Dryden's Essay _English Garner_, iii 546. On the next page is a happy hit at the shifts to which dramatists