Of Mr. Symonds's remarks on the general nature of blank verse the following are especially interesting: "English blank verse is perhaps more various and plastic than any other national metre. It is capable of being used for the most commonplace and the most sublime utterances.... Originally instituted for the drama, it received in Milton's hands an epical treatment, and has by authors of our own day been used for idyllic and even for lyrical compositions. Plato mentions a Greek musical instrument called _panharmonion_, which was adapted to express the different modes and systems of melodious utterance. This name might be applied to our blank verse; there is no harmony of sound, no dignity of movement, no swiftness, no subtlety of languid sweetness, no brevity, no force of emphasis, beyond its scope." (_Blank Verse_, pp. 16, 17.) "It seems adapted specially for thought in evolution; it requires progression and sustained effort. As a consequence of this, its melody is determined by the sense which it contains, and depends more upon proportion and harmony of sounds than upon recurrences and regularities of structure.... Another point about blank verse is that it admits of no mediocrity; it must be either clay or gold.... Hence, we find that blank verse has been the metre of genius, that it is only used successfully by indubitable poets, and that it is no favorite in a mean, contracted, and unimaginative age. The freedom of the renaissance created it in England. The freedom of our century has reproduced it. Blank verse is a type and symbol of our national literary spirit--uncontrolled by precedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection at intervals by an inner force and _vivida vis_ of native inspiration." (_Ibid._ pp. 70-72.) The earliest use of the term "blank verse," noted in the _New English Dictionary_, is in Nash's Preface to Greene's _Menaphon_, 1589: "the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse." Some ten years later Shakspere used it in _Much Ado about Nothing_, V. ii., where Benedick speaks of those heroes "whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of blank verse," but will not rime easily. In Chapman's _All Fools_ (1605) the young gallant, in describing his manifold accomplishments, says he could write "Sonnets in Dozens, or your Quatorzains In any rhyme, Masculine, Feminine, Or Sdruciolla, or couplets, or Blank Verse." _Sdruciolla_ is the Italian term for triple-rimed endings.