The two short epistles on Benevolence and Taste, have ease and vigour enough to shew that he could, with a little practice, have written as well in the couplet measure as he did in blank verse.

"If one would forsake the world let him go to Imber," says a modern writer, and an old couplet runs "Imber on the Down, four miles from any town."

But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for this occasion: for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together.