This tragedy, although Dryden curiously instanced it in defence of the use of rime on the stage, was the earliest English drama in blank verse. The metre is decidedly more monotonous than Surrey's, and gives little hint of the possibilities of the measure for dramatic expression. In general, the early experiments in blank verse suggest--what they must often have seemed to their writers--the mere use of the decasyllabic couplet deprived of its rime. Nevertheless, as Mr. Symonds remarks of a passage in _Gorboduc_, "we yet may trace variety and emphasis in the pauses of these lines beyond what would at that epoch have been possible in sequences of rhymed couplets." (_Blank Verse_, p. 20.) For a specimen of the blank verse of Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ (1576, the earliest didactic poem in English blank verse), see p. 18, above. Paris, King Priam's son, thou art arraigned of partiality, Of sentence partial and unjust, for that without indifferency, Beyond desert or merit far, as thine accusers say, From them, to Lady Venus here, thou gavest the prize away: What is thine answer? _Paris's oration to the Council of the Gods:_ Sacred and just, thou great and dreadful Jove, And you thrice-reverend powers, whom love nor hate May wrest awry; if this, to me a man, This fortune fatal be, that I must plead For safe excusal of my guiltless thought, The honor more makes my mishap the less, That I a man must plead before the gods, Gracious forbearers of the world's amiss, For her, whose beauty how it hath enticed, This heavenly senate may with me aver. (GEORGE PEELE: _The Arraignment of Paris_, IV. i. 61-75. 1584.) This specimen shows the new measure introduced into the drama in connection with the earlier rimed septenary. Peele's verse in general is characterized by sweetness and fluency, but there is still no hint of the possibilities of the unrimed decasyllabics. Schröer, in the article cited from _Anglia_, enumerates the following additional specimens of blank verse before the appearance of Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_; Grimald's _Death of Zoroas_ and _Death of Cicero_, in Tottel's _Songs and Sonnets_, 1557; _Jocasta_, by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarshe, 1566; Turberville's translation of Ovid's _Heroical Epistles_, 1567; Spenser's unrimed sonnets, in Van der Noodt's _Theatre for Worldlings_, 1569; Barnaby Rich's _Don Simonides_, 1584; parts of Lyly's _Woman in the Moon_, 1584; Greene's "Description of Silvestro's Lady," in _Morando_, 1587; _The Misfortunes of Arthur_, 1587;--the last two appearing probably in the same year with _Tamburlaine_, whether earlier or later is uncertain. Most of these specimens are short, and all are comparatively unimportant.