The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,-- Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire; There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire May mollify, milk, honey redolent With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content. The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food; Affording banquets without death or blood. Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy: And yet not all; in pastures horses joy: So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath (Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin, That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb! That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become! While by one creature's death another lives! Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul's, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:--