25.  Among the earliest of the English grammarians, was Ben Jonson, the poet; who died in the year 1637, at the age of sixty-three.  His grammar, (which Horne Tooke mistakingly calls “the first as well as the best English grammar,”) is still extant, being published in the several editions of his works.  It is a small treatise, and worthy of attention only as a matter of curiosity.  It is written in prose, and designed chiefly for the aid of foreigners.  Grammar is an unpoetical subject, and therefore not wisely treated, as it once very generally was, in verse.  But every poet should be familiar with the art, because the formal principles of his own have always been considered as embraced in it.  To its poets, too, every language must needs be particularly indebted; because their compositions, being in general more highly finished than works in prose, are supposed to present the language in its most agreeable form.  In the preface to the Poems of Edmund Waller, published in 1690, the editor ventures to say, “He was, indeed, the Parent of English Verse, and the first that shewed us our Tongue had Beauty and Numbers in it.  Our Language owes more to Him, than the French does to Cardinal Richelieu and the whole Academy. * * * * The Tongue came into His hands a rough diamond:  he polished it first; and to that degree, that all artists since him have admired the workmanship, without pretending to mend it.”—­British Poets, Vol. ii, Lond., 1800:  Waller’s Poems, p. 4.

26.  Dr. Johnson, however, in his Lives of the Poets, abates this praise, that he may transfer the greater part of it to Dryden and Pope.  He admits that, “After about half a century of forced thoughts and rugged metre, some advances towards nature and harmony had been already made by Waller and Denham;” but, in distributing the praise of this improvement, he adds, “It may be doubted whether Waller and Denham could have over-born [overborne] the prejudices which had long prevailed, and which even then were sheltered by the protection of Cowley.  The new versification, as it was called, may be considered as owing its establishment to Dryden; from whose time it is apparent that English poetry has had no tendency to relapse to its former savageness.”—­Johnson’s Life of Dryden:  Lives, p. 206.  To Pope, as the translator of Homer, he gives this praise:  “His version may be said to have tuned the English tongue; for since its appearance no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody.”—­Life of Pope:  Lives, p. 567.  Such was the opinion of Johnson; but there are other critics who object to the versification of Pope, that it is “monotonous and cloying.”  See, in Leigh Hunt’s Feast of the Poets, the following couplet, and a note upon it: 

   “But ever since Pope spoil’d the ears of the town
    With his cuckoo-song verses half up and half down.”