With notes by _Bently_ they'd be better still.

Swift he detests--not of course for detestable qualities, but because he
is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed to
blank verse:--

Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see,
_Milton's_ an _universal Blank_ to me ...
_Thompson _[_sic_] write blank, but know that for that reason
These lines shall live, when thine are out of season.
Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays
As _London_ Ladies owe their shape to stays.

In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning fashion.
But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero condemns,
he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but sparse
advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor
Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of them
styles "this unharmonious measure." Goldsmith, in particular, would
probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the
controlling powers of rhyme. "If rhymes, therefore," he writes, in the
_Enquiry into Polite Learning_,[6] "be more difficult [than blank
verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme.
Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and
encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain,
plays highest by diminishing the aperture."[7]

Notes: