Note 138 — ACT II.
Reading edition
Mr. L—— takes occasion in this place to commend the great care of our author to preserve the metre of blank verse, in which Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, were so notoriously negligent; and the moderns, in imitation of our author, so laudably observant:
"Then does Your majesty believe that he can be A traitor?"—"Earl of Essex."
Every page of Sophonisba gives us instances of this excellence.