Note 138 — GREVILLE and JULIA.

l. 1.—The English Ballad uses the past tense thro’ the three first stanzas; this Paraphrase the more dramatic, more impressive present tense. The distant clocks, marking the midnight hour, is not in either the Ballad or the Latin poem. In William and Margaret, each stanza rhymes only twice, but the first has no rhyme. Our best writers use the imperfect rhymes freely, and I think to the advantage of their verse, as mourn and scorn, abode and God, frost and coast;—but feet and sleep, which are given as rhymes in the exordium of that Ballad, are not within the bounds of privilege.