The inaccuracy of the rhymes excited him to alteration, which occasioned a fresh inconvenience, that of similar rhymes in the next couplet but one.—Wakefield.
Dryden's Prologue to the Second Part of the Conquest of Granada:
They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
[64] In the manuscript there are two more lines, of which the second was afterwards introduced into the Dunciad:
Though such with reason men of sense abhor;
Fool against fool is barb'rous civil war.
Though Mævius scribble and the city knight, &c.
The city knight was Sir Richard Blackmore, who resided in Cheapside. "In the early part of Blackmore's time," says Johnson, "a citizen was a term of reproach, and his place of abode was a topic to which his adversaries had recourse in the penury of scandal."
[65] Dryden's Persius, Sat. i. 100:
Who would be poets in Apollo's spite.
[66] "The simile of the mule," says Warton, "heightens the satire, and is new," but the comparison fails in the essential point. Pope's "half-learn'd witlings," who aim at being wit and critic, are inferior to both, whereas the mule, to which he likens the literary pretender, is in speed and strength superior to the ass.
[67] "I am confident," says Dryden in the dedication of his Virgil, "that you will look on those half-lines hereafter as the imperfect products of a hasty muse, like the frogs and serpents in the Nile, part of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unformed, unanimated mud."