[149] These poems are also printed in Böddeker, _Altengl. Dichtungen_, Geistl. Lieder, xviii, Weltl. Lieder, xiv. [150] _Chaucer's Sprache und Verskunst_, § 305, note. [151] The verses he calls five-foot lines have, on the other hand, decidedly not this structure, but are four-foot lines with unaccented rhymes; for a final word in the line, such us _wrécfúl_, as is assumed by Ten Brink, with the omission of an unaccented syllable between the last two accents, would be utterly inconsistent with the whole character of this metre. [152] According to Ten Brink, _Chaucer's Sprache und Verskunst_, § 305, the shifting character of Chaucer's caesura was chiefly caused by his acquaintance with the Italian _endecasillabo_. This influence may have come in later, but even in Chaucer's early _Compleynt to Pitee_ (according to Ten Brink, _Geschichte der englischen Literatur_, ii. p. 49, his first poem written under the influence of the French decasyllabic verse) the caesura is here moveable, though not to the same extent as in the later poems. The liability of the caesura to shift its position was certainly considerably increased by the accentual character of English rhythm. On the untenableness of his assertion, that in Chaucer's five-accent verse the epic caesura is unknown, cf. p. 145 (footnote), _Metrik_, ii. 101-3 note, and Schipper in Paul's _Grundriss_, ed. 2, II. ii, pp. 217-21. DIVISION III VERSE-FORMS OCCURRING IN MODERN ENGLISH POETRY ONLY CHAPTER XII BLANK VERSE § =160. The Beginnings of Modern English Poetry.= Puttenham, in his _Arte of English Poesie_, i. 31, speaks of Surrey and Wyatt as having originated the modern period of English poetry. This is true in so far as their poems are the first to show clearly--especially in metrical form--the influence of the spirit of the Renaissance, which had been making itself felt in English Literature for some time past. The new tendencies manifested themselves not only in the actual introduction of new rhythms and verse-forms borrowed from Classical and Italian poetry, but also in the endeavour to regulate and reform the native poetry according to the metrical laws and peculiarities of foreign models, especially of the ancient classics. There were, indeed, several features of classical poetry which invited imitation, and the introduction of which produced the chief differences between Modern English and Middle English versification. These features are: