Lastly, a =stanza of twenty lines= with the scheme _a b ~ a c d b ~ d c e e₃ f₄ g g₃ f₄ h h₃ i₄ k ~ k ~₃ i₄_, occurs in _The King of France's Daughter_ (Percy's _Rel._ III. ii. 17); cf. _Metrik_, ii, § 454. PART III MODERN STANZAS AND METRES OF FIXED FORM ORIGINATING UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE RENASCENCE, OR INTRODUCED LATER CHAPTER VI STANZAS OF THREE AND MORE PARTS CONSISTING OF UNEQUAL PARTS ONLY § =287. Introductory remark.= At the very beginning of the Modern English period the poetry of England was strongly influenced by that of Italy. Among the strophic forms used by the Italian poets, two especially have had an important share in the development of English metre: the sonnet and the canzone. Apart from those direct imitations which we shall have to notice later, the sonnet form tended to make more popular the use of enclosing rhymes, which had until then been only sparingly employed in English poetry; while the canzone with its varied combinations of anisometrical verses, mostly of eleven and seven syllables, gave rise to a variety of similar loosely constructed stanzas, as a rule, of three- and five-foot verses. At the same time, however, these Modern English stanzas of a somewhat loose structure were also affected by the stricter rules for the formation of stanzas which had come down from the Middle English period. Hence their structure frequently reminds us of the older forms, two adjoining parts being often closely related, either by order of rhymes, or by the structure of the verse, or by both together, though the old law of the equality of the two _pedes_ or of the two _versus_ is not quite strictly observed. This explains the fact that some stanzas (especially the shorter ones) have a structure similar to that of the old tripartite stanzas; while others (chiefly the longer ones) not unfrequently consist of four or even more parts. In the first group the chief interest centres round those which have enclosing rhymes in their first or last part. Although the transposition of the order of rhymes thus effected in the _pedes_ or in the _versus_ was common both in Northern French and Provençal poets,[196] the teachers of the Middle English poets, we find scarcely a single example of it in Middle English, and it seems to have become popular in Modern English only through the influence of the Italian sonnet.