ecause it is incontestable that the French 'Fabliaux,'
which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property of
the mediaeval nations. But his indirect debt in all that concerns
elegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic with
the classic spirit, which forms the chief charm of such tales as the
Palamon and Arcite, can hardly be exaggerated. Lastly, the seven-lined
stanza, called _rime royal_, which Chaucer used with so much effect in
narrative poetry, was probably borrowed from the earlier Florentine
'Ballata,' the last line rhyming with its predecessor being
substituted for the recurrent refrain. Indeed, the stanza itself, as
used by our earliest poets, may be found in Guido Cavalcanti's
'Ballatetta,' beginning, _Posso degli occhi miei_.

Between Chaucer and Surrey the Muse of England fell asleep; but when
in the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII. she awoke again, it was
as a conscious pupil of the Italian that she attempted new strains and
essayed fresh metres. 'In the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign,' says
Puttenham, 'sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir T.
Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains,
who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and
stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly
crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly
polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had
been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers
of our English metre and style.' The chief point in which Surrey
imitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha,' was in the use of the
sonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our
literature; and how it has thriven with us, the masterpieces of
Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti attest. As
practised by Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen
lines, divided into two quatrains and two triplets, so arranged that
the two quatrains repeat one pair of rhymes, while the two triplets
repeat another pair. Thus an Italian sonnet of the strictest form is
composed upon four rhymes, interlaced with great art. But much
divergence from this rigid scheme of rhyming was admitted even by
Petrarch, who not unfrequently divided the six final lines of the
sonnet into three couplets, interwoven in such a way that the two last
lines never rhymed.[17]

It has been necessary to say thus