It was Gower and Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, who brought the use of the eight-syllable couplet to the point of accuracy and perfection. Gower made it the vehicle of the interminable narrative of the _Confessio Amantis_, using it with regularity but with great monotony. Chaucer transformed it into a much more flexible form (with freedom of cesura, _enjambement_, and inversions), using it in about 3500 lines of his poetry (excluding the translation of the _Roman de la Rose_), but early leaving it for the decasyllabic verse. In modern English poetry this short couplet has rarely been used for continuous narrative of a serious character, except by Byron and Wordsworth. But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced choir below, In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all heaven before my eyes. (MILTON: _Il Penseroso_, ll. 155-166. 1634.) A sect whose chief devotion lies In odd, perverse antipathies, In falling out with that or this And finding something still amiss; More peevish, cross, and splenetic Than dog distract or monkey sick: That with more care keep holyday The wrong, than others the right way; Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to.... Rather than fail they will defy That which they love most tenderly; Quarrel with mince-pies, and disparage Their best and dearest friend plum-porridge, Fat pig and goose itself oppose, And blaspheme custard through the nose. (SAMUEL BUTLER: _Hudibras_, Part I. 1663.) Butler made the octosyllabic couplet so entirely his own, for the purposes of his jogging satiric verse, that ever since it has frequently been called "Hudibrastic." The ingenuity of his rimes added not a little to its effectiveness. In the _Spectator_ (No. 249) Addison said that burlesque poetry runs best "in doggrel like that of _Hudibras_, ... when a hero is to be pulled down and degraded;" otherwise in the heroic measure. He speaks also of "the generality" of Butler's readers as being "wonderfully pleased with the double rhymes."