Page:A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style.djvu/257

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Milton.
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that he raises Your Courage, Your Pity, and Your Fear, at his Pleasure, but he delighteth most in Terror.

Milton, my Lord, is the Assertor of Poetic Liberty, and would have freed us from the Bondage of Rhime, but like Sinners, and like Lovers, we hug our Chain, and are pleased in being Slaves. Some indeed have made some faint Attempts to break it, but their Verse had all the Softness and Effeminacy of Rhime without the Music: And Dryden himself, who sometimes struggled to get loose, always relapsed, and was faster bound than ever; but Rhime was his Province, and he could

make