A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech.
- John Thelwall
- Date:
- 1810
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A letter to Henry Cline, on imperfect developments of the faculties, mental and moral, as well as constitutional and organic, and on the treatment of impediments of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.
176/292 page 164
![‘ correspondent, either for the alteration he has of+ fered, or for any thing I suspect either critic or | poet to be capable of suggesting. I am, indeed, much inclined to suspect—that this objection (like the generality of those cavils to which the rhythmus and construction of Milton have been’so frequently exposed,) has originated in that system of erroneous mechanism so generally applied to the act of read- . ing our English poets: a system which, in many instances, has even deformed our typography, ‘cor- rupted our orthography, turned into absolute dis- sonance some of the most exquisite verses in our language, and caused: to be regarded as extremely difficult, to the reader and the reciter, an author, who, considering the sublimity of his ideas, and the vastness of his erudition, is, perhaps, the easiest of all authors who ever wrote. [1 might have added—that this erroneous hy pothesis of numerical. mechanism has even debased the genius of our versification, by occasioning not a few of what are called our correct poets, anxiously to avoid modes + of construction and arrangement, which they ought most sedulously to have ‘cultivated. ] Give to the verses of Milton (what all verses ought to have) the easy flow of aspontancous and oratorical utter-. ance—the objections advanced by silent, inappre-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33089449_0176.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
