took from Latin its rhymelessness, but it retained accent instead of quantity as the basis of its line.  The line Surrey used is the five-foot or ten-syllable line of what is called “heroic verse”—­the line used by Chaucer in his Prologue and most of his tales.  Like Milton he deplored rhyme as the invention of a barbarous age, and no doubt he would have rejoiced to go further and banish accent as well as rhymed endings.  That, however, was not to be, though in the best blank verse of later time accent and quantity both have their share in the effect.  The instrument he forged passed into the hands of the dramatists:  Marlowe perfected its rhythm, Shakespeare broke its monotony and varied its cadences by altering the spacing of the accents, and occasionally by adding an extra unaccented syllable.  It came back from the drama to poetry with Milton.  His blindness and the necessity under which it laid him of keeping in his head long stretches of verse at one time, because he could not look back to see what he had written, probably helped his naturally quick and delicate sense of cadence to vary the pauses, so that a variety of accent and interval might replace the valuable aid to memory which he put aside in putting aside rhyme.  Perhaps it is to two accidents, the accident by which blank verse as the medium of the actor had to be retained easily in the memory, and the accident of Milton’s blindness, that must be laid the credit of more than a little of the richness of rhythm of this, the chief and greatest instrument of English verse.

The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey began, was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry.  Laborious research has indeed found a Continental original for almost every great poem of the time, and for very many forgotten ones as well.  It is easy for the student engaged in this kind of literary exploration to exaggerate the importance of what he finds, and of late years criticism, written mainly by these explorers, has tended to assume that since it can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all.  Petrarch, they will tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when Sidney uses Petrarch’s imagery and even translates his words in order to express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist and not a lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to have inspired his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an academic exercise.  If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a very much lesser and meaner thing than later ages have thought