The "Defence" of the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to
Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered passages in subsequent
prefaces and dedications. All the interlocutors agree that "the sweetness
of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers," and
that "our poesy is much improved by the happiness of some writers yet
living, who first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and
significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to
make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never
mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it." In another
place he shows that by "living writers" he meant Waller and Denham.
"Rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. But the
excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr. Waller
taught it: he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to
conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which in the verse before
him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath
to overtake it."[51] Dryden afterwards changed his mind, and one of the
excellences of his own rhymed verse is, that his sense is too ample to be
concluded by the distich. Rhyme had been censured as unnatural in
dialogue; but Dryden replies that it is no more so than blank verse,
since no man talks any kind of verse in real life.
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