To Davenant's _Gondibert_ is usually traced the use of this "heroic" stanza (_abab_ in iambic five-stress lines) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his preface the author said: "I believed it would be more pleasant to the reader, in a work of length, to give this respite or pause, between every stanza, ... than to run him out of breath with continued couplets. Nor doth alternate rime by any lowliness of cadence make the sound less heroic, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately composing of music." Dryden followed Davenant in using the stanza for his _Annus Mirabilis_, saying in his preface: "I have chosen to write my poem in quatrains, or stanzas of four in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged them more noble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us.... I have always found the couplet verse most easy (though not so proper for this occasion), for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labor of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together." Dryden did not use the stanza again, however, and it is obviously unsuited to a long narrative poem. Saintsbury says: "With regard to the nobility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that _Annus Mirabilis_ itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults.... It is chargeable with more than the disjointedness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the _ottava rima_, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves." (_Life of Dryden_, Men of Letters Series, p. 34.)