The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed to find that we have travelled through so many centuries of the life of English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely be scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very dim, perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the language, the obsolescence of the sound of the final _e_, and the Anglicizing of the sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the accent (as in honour for honour, virtue for virtue). Wyatt, when he began to write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and counted syllables on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten of them, in a line. To rhyme "aggrieved" to "wearied," is like the tramp's effort to make "workhouse" rhyme with "sorrow". The young student in a novel of Henri Murger's reads only the rhymes in sonnets. If we study in that way Wyatt's sonnet "The Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last words in the first eight lines are aggrieved last past wearied buried fast haste stirred. He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes in the first eight lines _a b b a a b b a_, but, contrary to Italian rule, his last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. The sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, while in the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the withdrawal of the wave of the first eight lines. The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, afforded excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring delicacy and order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as written by Skelton and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is among the rarest of good things, and the mere technical difficulties once overcome, men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value with the rapidity of machine work. The stock character of this kind of poetry, the Lover, with his strange far-fetched conceit in his almost metaphysical refinements, is apt to become as tedious as the old figures of allegory; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt improved with practice in sonnet-making, though such rhymes as "mount_ains_" "fount_ains_," "pl_ains_," "rem_ains_," are a stumbling-block to the modern reader. But his "And wilt thou leave me thus?" and "Forget not yet the tried intent," with their brief refrains are immortal lyrics, heralding the music of the age of Elizabeth.