Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton have lent the authority of their great names to certain distinct variations from the rigid Petrarchan type. The peculiarity of Spenser's sonnets is that the rime of the octave overflows into the sestet, thus marring the exquisite balance which should subsist between the two parts, and yielding an effect of cloying sweetness. Although the famous stanza-form which he invented in his "Faerie Queene" has found many imitators, his sonnet innovations are practically unimportant. The Shakespearean sonnet, on the contrary, must be regarded as a well-established variant from the stricter Italian form. Though Shakespeare's name has made it famous, it did not originate with him. Surrey and Daniel had habitually employed it, and in fact it had come to be recognized as the accepted English form. Its characteristic feature, as the following sonnet from Shakespeare will show, was a division into three distinct quatrains, each with alternating rimes, and closed by a couplet. The transition of thought at the ninth line is usually observed:-- "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee--and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings." It is Milton's merit that he rescued the sonnet from the snare of verbal wit in which the Elizabethans had involved it, and made it respond to other passions than that of love. His sonnets, as imitations of the Italian form, are more successful than the scattered efforts in that direction of Wyatt and Surrey. They are indeed regular in all respects, save that he is not always careful to observe the pause in the thought, and the subtle change which should divide the octave from the sestet. After Milton there is a pause in sonnet-writing for a hundred years. William Lisles Bowles (1762-1850), memorable for his influence upon Coleridge, was among the first again to cultivate the form. Coleridge and Shelley gave the sonnet scant attention, and were careless as to its structural qualities. Keats, apart from Wordsworth, was the only poet of the early years of the century who realized its capabilities. He has written a few of our memorable sonnets, but he was not entirely satisfied with the accepted form, and experimented upon variations that cannot be regarded as successful.