This way of writing was misunderstood and neglected by Chaucer's English disciples, but was followed nearly a century later by the Scottish poet, called Blind Harry (_c._ 1475), whose _Wallace_ holds an important place in the history of versification as having passed on the tradition of the heroic couplet. Another Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, selected heroic verse for his translation of the _Aeneid_ (1513), and displayed, in such examples as the following, a skill which left little room for improvement at the hands of later poets:-- "One sang, 'The ship sails over the salt foam, Will bring the merchants and my leman home'; Some other sings, 'I will be blithe and light, Mine heart is leant upon so goodly wight.'" The verse so successfully mastered was, however, not very generally used for heroic purposes in Tudor literature. The early poets of the revival, and Spenser and Shakespeare after them, greatly preferred stanzaic forms. For dramatic purposes blank verse was almost exclusively used, although the French had adopted the rhymed alexandrine for their plays. In the earlier half of the 17th century, heroic verse was often put to somewhat unheroic purposes, mainly in prologues and epilogues, or other short poems of occasion; but it was nobly redeemed by Marlowe in his _Hero and Leander_ and respectably by Browne in his _Britannia's Pastorals_. It is to be noted, however, that those Elizabethans who, like Chapman, Warner and Drayton, aimed at producing a warlike and Homeric effect, did so in shambling fourteen-syllable couplets. The one heroic poem of that age written at considerable length in the appropriate national metre is the _Bosworth Field_ of Sir John Beaumont (1582-1628). Since the middle of the 17th century, when heroic verse became the typical and for a while almost the solitary form in which serious English poetry was written, its history has known many vicissitudes. After having been the principal instrument of Dryden and Pope, it was almost entirely rejected by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but revised, with various modifications, by Byron, Shelley (in _Julian and Maddalo_) and Keats (in _Lamia_). In the second half of the 19th century its prestige was restored by the brilliant work of Swinburne in _Tristram_ and elsewhere. (E. G.)