The hexameter was introduced into English poetry by Gabriel Harvey (1545-1630), who, in his _Encomium Lauri_, attempted to imitate the quantitative classic verse in the accentual English language, paying attention as much as possible to the quantity of the English words. Sir Philip Sidney followed with some poetical portions of his _Arcadia_ written in this metre; Stanyhurst (1545-1618) translated the first four books of Virgil in quantitative hexameters; in 1591 Abraham Fraunce translated Virgil's _Alexis_, and William Webbe, the metrist, turned into English the _Georgics_ and two eclogues of the same poet, also in quantitative hexameters; but all these efforts had little success on account of the unfitness of English for quantitative treatment. Robert Greene also employed this metre in some of his minor poems, but followed the accentual system; on this account he was more successful, but he found no imitators, and during the latter part of the seventeenth century the metre fell altogether into disuse. In one isolated case about the middle of the eighteenth century it was revived by an anonymous translator of Virgil's first and fourth eclogues. But English hexameters did not begin to come into favour again before the close of the eighteenth century, when the influence of the study of German poetry began to make itself felt. Parts of Klopstock's _Messiah_ were translated by William Taylor (1765-1836) in the metre of the original. He also turned several passages of Ossian into hexameters (published in June, 1796, in the _Monthly Magazine_), and maintained that the hexameter, modified after the German fashion by the substitution of the accentual for the quantitative principle and the use of trochees instead of spondees, could be used with as good effect in English as in German. About the same time, Coleridge used the hexameter in some of his minor poems, _Hymn to the Earth_, _Mahomet_, &c., and Southey chose this form for his longer poem, _A Vision of Judgement_. But it was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that the English hexameter came into somewhat more extensive use. It was at first chiefly employed in translations from the German. Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_ has been translated five times at least (for the first time by Cochrane, Oxford, 1850). The metre has also been employed in translations of classical poetry, especially Homer and Virgil, and in original poems, none of which, however, have attained general popularity except those by Longfellow, especially his _Evangeline_ and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_.