But I have said too much in the defence of verse; for, after all, it is a very indifferent thing to me whether it obtain or not. I am content hereafter to be ordered by his rule, that is, to write it sometimes because it pleases me, and so much the rather, because he has declared that it pleases him. But he has taken his last farewell of the muses, and he has done it civilly, by honouring them with the name of "his long acquaintances," which is a compliment they have scarce deserved from him. For my own part, I bear a share in the public loss; and how emulous soever I may be of his fame and reputation, I cannot but give this testimony of his style, that it is extremely poetical, even in oratory; his thoughts elevated sometimes above common apprehension; his notions politic and grave, and tending to the instruction of princes, and reformation of states; that they are abundantly interlaced with variety of fancies, tropes, and figures, which the critics have enviously branded with the name of obscurity and false grammar. "Well, he is now fettered in business of more unpleasant nature:" The muses have lost him, but the commonwealth gains by it; the corruption of a poet is the generation of a statesman. "He will not venture again into the civil wars of censure, _ubi--nullos habitura triumphos_:" If he had not told us he had left the muses, we might have half suspected it by that word _ubi_, which does not any way belong to them in that place: the rest of the verse is indeed Lucan's, but that _ubi_, I will answer for it, is his own. Yet he has another reason for this disgust of poesy; for he says immediately after, that "the manner of plays which are now in most esteem is beyond his power to perform:" to perform the manner of a thing, I confess, is new English to me. "However, he condemns not the satisfaction of others, but rather their unnecessary understanding, who, like Sancho Panza's doctor, prescribe too strictly to our appetites; for," says he, "in the difference of tragedy and comedy, and of farce itself, there can be no determination but by the taste, nor in the manner of their composure."