and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so
copiously translated his Grecisms and the Latin elegances of Virgil.
It is true, he runs into a flat of thought, sometimes for a hundred
lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture.
His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein
he imitated Spenser, as Spencer did Chaucer. And though, perhaps,
the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the
frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be
laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more
significant than those in practice, and when their obscurity is
taken away by joining other words to them which clear the sense--
according to the rule of Horace for the admission of new words. But
in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for
unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into
affectation--a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I
justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the
example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians who have used it; for,
whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have
not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is
plainly this--that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease
of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest in his
"Juvenilia" or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is
always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost
every man a rhymer, though not a poet.

By this time, my lord, I doubt not but that you wonder why I have
run off from my bias so long together, and made so tedious a
digression from satire to heroic poetry; but if you will not excuse
it by the tattling quality of age (which, as Sir William Davenant