Daniel's _Defence of Rhyme_ may be said to have dealt a death-blow to a movement which for over half a century had been a subject of controversy among English men of letters. In reading the critical works of this period, it is impossible not to notice the remarkable amount of attention paid by the Elizabethans to the question of classical metres in the vernacular. The first organized attempt to introduce the classical versification into a modern language was, as Daniel himself points out,[540] that of Claudio Tolomei in 1539. The movement then passed into France; and classical metres were adopted by Baif in practice, and defended by Jacques de la Taille in theory. In England the first recorded attempt at the use of quantity in the vernacular was that of Thomas Watson, from whose unpublished translation of the _Odyssey_ in the metre of the original Ascham has cited a single distich:-- "All travellers do gladly report great prayse of Ulysses, For that he knew many mens maners, and saw many cities."[541] This was probably written between 1540 and 1550; toward the close of the preceding century, we are told, a certain Mousset had already translated the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ into French hexameters. Ascham was the first critical champion of the use of quantity in English verse.[542] Rhyme, he says, was introduced by the Goths and Huns at a time when poetry and learning had ceased to exist in Europe; and Englishmen must choose either to imitate these barbarians or to follow the perfect Grecians. He acknowledges that the monosyllabic character of the English language renders the use of the dactyl very difficult, for the hexameter "doth rather trot and hobble than run smoothly in our English tongue;" but he argues that English will receive the _carmen iambicum_ as naturally as Greek or Latin. He praises Surrey's blank verse rendering of the fourth book of the _AEneid_, but regrets that, in disregarding quantity, it falls short of the "perfect and true versifying." An attempt to put Ascham's theories into practice was made by Thomas Blenerhasset in 1577; but the verse of his _Complaynt of Cadwallader_, though purporting to be "a new kind of poetry," is merely an unrhymed Alexandrine.[543]