reverting to the metre that Milton had scorned to touch. It is not
till the present century that blank verse can be said to have fairly
taken seisin of the epic; one of the many services that English poetry
owes to the genius of Keats.

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