_Beppo_ is also a narrative, founded on a rather unimpressive anecdote. The merchant, Beppo, departed on a trading trip, fails to return to his wife, Laura, and she, thinking him dead, consoles herself with a Count for her lover. After some years, Beppo comes back, to meet his wife and her cavalier at a ball. She is reconciled to her husband, the Count becomes Beppo’s friend, and the story ends. Since these main features of the plot differ so widely from the incidents in _The Monks, and the Giants_, we are forced to seek, therefore, for similarities in manner and style between the two poems. Unquestionably the fact that Frere’s work was written in ottava rima[187] did affect Byron. It is true that the latter poet had selected the octave stanza for his _Epistle to Augusta_, composed near Geneva in 1816, before he had entered Italy and before Frere’s poem had come to his attention; but the _Epistle_ had been serious and romantic, without a touch of humor or of satire. Byron had also been familiar with the use of the octave stanza in Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, and, as we shall see, in Casti’s _Novelle_. But of its employment in English for humorous purposes there had been few examples, and Byron made no reference to any such experiments by English poets. In managing the octave, Frere had resorted to a somewhat free and loose versification, diversified by frequent run-on lines and many novel rhymes. Probably this unconstrained metrical structure appealed greatly to Byron; but it must be remembered that since 1811 he had been avoiding the heroic couplet and practising in some less restricted measures. In _Childe Harold_ he had used a true stanzaic form, occasionally with humorous effect. He had also, even in his first published volume, shown facility in the rhyming of extraordinary words and combinations of syllables, an art in which he had as guides Butler, Swift, and Moore, all of whom were more skilful than Frere. Granting that Frere did suggest to Byron the possibility of making the octave a colloquial stanza, we cannot escape the conclusion that the latter went beyond his model. For one thing, he was less careful about accuracy in rhyming. Eichler, after a detailed examination of _The Monks, and the Giants_ and _Beppo_, estimates that in the former poem only one rhyme out of thirty is humorously inexact, in the latter, one out of six. Frere’s entire work, more than double the length of _Beppo_, has only eleven examples of “two-word rhymes,” while _Beppo_ has fifty-one. Eichler’s tables show conclusively that Byron employed for rhymes many more foreign words and proper names than Frere, and that he discovered more odd combinations of English words. In addition he utilized the enjambement in a more daring fashion. Certainly, in nearly every respect, Byron was more lax in his versification than Frere had been in his.[188]