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both in longer and shorter Works, as have also long since our best
English Tragedies, as a thing of it self, to all judicious eares,
triveal and of no true musical delight: which consists only in apt
Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out
from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings,
a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good
Oratory This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect
though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be
esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty
recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of
Rimeing.
Note: The Verse] Added in 1668 to the copies then remaining of the first
edition; together with the Argument. In the second edition (1674) the
Argument, with the necessary adjustment to the division made in Books
vii and x, was distributed through the several books of the poem, as it
is here printed.
BOOK I.
THE ARGUMENT.
204
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