In 1580, however, five letters which had passed between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey appeared in print as _Three proper, and wittie, familiar Letters_ and _Two other very commendable Letters_; and from this correspondence we learn that an organized movement to introduce classical metres into English had been started. It would seem that for several years Harvey had been advocating the use of quantitative verse to several of his friends; but the organized movement to which reference has just been made seems to have been started independently by Thomas Drant, who died in 1578. Drant had devised a set of rules and precepts for English classical verse; and these rules, with certain additions and modifications, were adopted by a coterie of scholars and courtiers, among them being Sidney, Dyer, Greville, and Spenser, who thereupon formed a society, the Areopagus,[544] independent of Harvey, but corresponding with him regularly. This society appears to have been modelled on Baif's Academie de Poesie et de Musique, which had been founded in 1570 for a similar purpose, and which Sidney doubtless became acquainted with when at Paris in 1572. From the correspondence published in 1580, it becomes evident that Harvey's and Drant's systems of versification were almost antipodal. According to Drant's system, the quantity of English words was to be regulated entirely by the laws of Latin prosody,--by position, diphthong, and the like. Thus, for example, the penult of the word _carpenter_ was regarded as long by Drant because followed by two consonants. Harvey, who was unacquainted with Drant's rules before apprised of them by Spenser in the published letters, follows a more normal and logical system. To him, accent alone is the best of quantity, and the law of position cannot make the penult of _carpenter_ or _majesty_ long. "The Latin is no rule for us," says Harvey;[545] and often where position and diphthong fall together, as in the penult of _merchaundise_, we must pronounce the syllable short. In all such matters, the use, custom, propriety, or majesty of our speech must be accounted the only infallible and sovereign rule of rules. It was not, then, Harvey's purpose to Latinize our tongue. His intention was apparently twofold,--to abolish rhyme, and to introduce new metres into English poetry. Only a few years before, Gascoigne had lamented that English verse had only one form of metre, the iambic.[546] Harvey, in observing merely the English accent, can scarcely be said to have introduced quantity into our verse, but was simply adapting new metres, such as dactyls, trochees, and spondees, to the requirements of English poetry.