s stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to be
ranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as English
poetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almost
indigenous "eights and sixes" into fourteener lines and into alternate
fourteeners and Alexandrines, seems to have commended itself even more to
contemporary taste, and, as we have seen and shall see, it was eagerly
followed for more than half a century. But it was not destined to succeed.
These long lines, unless very sparingly used, or with the ground-foot
changed from the iambus to the anapaest or the trochee, are not in keeping
with the genius of English poetry, as even the great examples of Chapman's
_Homer_ and the _Polyolbion_ may be said to have shown once for all. In the
hands, moreover, of the poets of this particular time, whether they were
printed at length or cut up into eights and sixes, they had an almost
irresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble which is
inexpressibly monotonous. Even when the spur of a really poetical
inspiration excites this amble into something more fiery (the best example
existing is probably Southwell's wonderful "Burning Babe"), the sensitive
ear feels that there is constant danger of a relapse, and at the worst the
thing becomes mere doggerel. Yet for about a quarter of a century these
overgrown lines held the field in verse and drama alike, and the
encouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefits
which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the _Miscellany_
conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in
the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above all, the
sonnet.

It remains to say something of the matter as distinguished from the form of
this poetry, and for once the form is of hardly superior importance to the
matter. It is a question of some interest, though unfortunately one wholly
incapable of solution, whether the change in the character of poetical
thought and theme which Wyatt and Surrey wrought was accidental, and
consequent merely on their choice of models, and especially of Petrarch, or
essential and deliberate. If it was accidental, there is no greater
accident in the history of literature. The absence of the personal note in
mediaeval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been more
marked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey English poetry became at a