No species of verse appears to have been more eagerly and universally cultivated by the Italian poets, from the fourteenth century to the present times. Even the gravest of their epic and tragic writers have occasionally sported In these lighter bays. (A long list of them is given in the beginning of the fourth Volume of Quadrios History of Italian Poetry.) But perhaps the most elegant Italian sonnets are yet to be found in Dante. Petrarch's sonnets are too learned (metaphysical) and refined. Of Dante's compositions in this style I cannot give a better idea, than in (the ingenious) Mr. Hayley's happy translation of Dante's beautiful sonnet to his friend Guido Calvacanti [sic], written in his youth, and probably before the year 1300. Henry! I wish that you, and Charles, and I, By some sweet spell within a bark were plac'd, A gallant bark with magic virtue grac'd, Swift at our will with every wind to fly: So that no changes of the shifting sky No stormy terrors of the watery waste, Might bar our course, but heighten still our taste Of sprightly joy, and of our social tie: Then, that my Lucy, Lucy fair and free, With those soft nymphs on whom your souls are bent, The kind magician might to us convey, To talk of love throughout the livelong day: And that each fair might be as well content As I in truth believe our hearts would be.[5] We have before seen, that the _Sonnet_ was imported from Italy into English poetry, by lord Surrey and Wyat, about the middle of the sixteenth century. But it does not seem to have flourished in its legitimate form, till towards the close of the reign of queen Elisabeth. What I call the legitimate form, in which it now appeared, was not always free from licentious innovations in the rythmical arrangement.