I said that the ballad was the most primitive form of English verse composition of which examples have come down to us, and that it was the easiest form to write. I now come to what might almost be called the antithesis of the ballad--the sonnet. The ballad is simple, the sonnet is complex; the ballad appeals to the uneducated, being, as I said, merely a short story in verse, while the sonnet appeals chiefly to those who have a cultivated taste for poetry. It is easy, I said, to write a passable ballad; to write a sonnet that is merely correct in technique is a difficult matter, and to write a good sonnet calls for the exercise of all a verse-maker's patience, ingenuity and talent. Theodore Watts-Dunton, himself an accomplished sonneteer, finds the sonnet as "in the literature of modern Europe, a brief poetic form of fourteen rhymed verses, ranged according to prescription." This definition is open to criticism in two respects. In the first place it is redundant, since a poem of fourteen lines necessarily is brief. In the second place Watts-Dunton neglected to state that the length of the line is arbitrarily fixed--if the lines are not iambic pentameters, the poem is not a sonnet. The first requirements of the sonnet, then, are that it shall have fourteen lines, and that these lines shall be iambic pentameters. Furthermore, the rhyme scheme is arbitrarily fixed, and the number of rhymes arbitrarily limited in such a way as to add greatly to the verse-maker's labor. The simplest form of the sonnet is what is called the Shakespearean sonnet, from its use in the famous sequence in which the greatest of English poets is said to have "unlocked his heart"--although this does not seem a fair description of it, when we consider the great library of books in which attempts are made to explain what Shakespeare meant in these sonnets. This form consists merely of the quatrains, rhyming _a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f_, followed by a rhymed couplet. The lines are, as in all forms of the sonnet, iambic pentameters.