The most important discussion of the influence of Waller on English poetry, and on the heroic couplet in particular, is found in Mr. Gosse's book, _From Shakespeare to Pope_. Mr. Gosse regards Waller as inventing for himself the couplet of the classical school; "master," in 1623, of such verse as "was not imitated by a single poet for nearly twenty years" (p. 50). This view is criticised in an interesting article by Dr. Henry Wood, in the _American Journal of Philology_, vol. xi. p. 55. While Mr. Gosse places Waller's earliest couplets in 1621 and 1623, Dr. Wood would date them as late as 1626, and shows that Waller wrote nothing else until 1635. Meantime had appeared (the first volume at least as early as 1623) the translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, by George Sandys, in which, says Wood, all the characteristics of Waller's verse appear. "At all events," is his conclusion, "it was Sandys, and not Waller, who at the beginning of the third decade of the century, first of all Englishmen, made a uniform practice of writing in heroic couplets, which are, on the whole, in accord with the French rule, and which, for exactness of construction, and for harmonious sification, go far towards satisfying the demands of the later 'classical' school in England." Dr. Wood emphasizes the probable influence of the French poets on these early heroic couplets, calling attention to the fact that Sandys was in France in 1610. There is no evidence, however, that he was there for more than a few days, _en route_ to more eastern countries. Waller was not in France till 1643. The whole question of the influence of French poetry in England before the Restoration still remains to be carefully investigated. Meantime, the cautious student will hesitate to put too much stress on any single point of departure for the new style of versification. Many influences must have combined to make it popular. We have seen Professor Schelling emphasizing the influence of Jonson; he also very justly points out "that it is a mistake to consider that the Elizabethans often practised the couplet with the freedom, not to say license, that characterizes its nineteenth century use in the hands of such poets as Keats." Compare the couplets of even so romantic a poet as Marlowe, in the specimen given above from _Hero and Leander_. And even Mr. Gosse, in partial divergence from the doctrines of _From Shakespeare to Pope_, says of the satiric verse of the Elizabethan Rowlands: "There are lines in this passage which Pope would not have disdained to use. It might, indeed, be employed as against that old heresy, not even yet entirely discarded, that smoothness of heroic verse was the invention of Waller. As a matter of fact, this, as well as all other branches of the universal art of poetry, was understood by the great Elizabethan masters; and if they did not frequently employ it, it was because they left to such humbler writers as Rowlands an instrument incapable of