Before leaving this great triumvirate of the most potent and golden period of Italian letters—a triumvirate which represents three steps, from the sublimity of poetic vision, through the higher experiences of the poetic real, down to unelevated or vulgar facts of the reality of prose; from a Beatrice through a Laura to a Fiammetta, who was very much flesh and blood; we must not forget to note their several vehicles of verse. Dante wrote in the _terza rima_, or stanza of three lines, linked in an arrangement which we may represent by _a b a_, _b c b_, _c d c_, and so on consistently. This is not found before him, though after him it became appropriated to Italian philosophic and satirical poetry. Petrarch’s chief vehicle was the sonnet. Boccaccio composed his poems in the _ottava rima_, which he did not, indeed, invent, but which he fixed for ever after as the orthodox verse of Italian romance and epic, whether to be used by Ariosto and Tasso or by lesser men. The Italians are characteristically imitators of set forms, and the metres of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio have bound their followers in a degree in which Englishmen have never been bound by any metres. When English writers adopted Boccaccio’s _ottava rima_, they modified it. Chaucer dropped a line; Spenser added one. Yet both the stanza of Chaucer’s _Troilus and Cressida_ and the stanza of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ are none the less to be reckoned as borrowings from Italy, though both, we may believe, are improvements upon the original. That Spenser’s, at least, was such is shown by the unanimity with which Thomson, Byron, Shelley and Keats accepted it for sustained works of their own. * * * * *