It is interesting to note that the preference for the _sestina_ has not been confined to mediæval poets or Romance languages. Mr. Swinburne, to mention but one instance, has essayed the form with excellent results, both in French and English. But the model he has followed is not derived from the Provençal original, nor yet from the Italian copy, but from a modified French version of the scheme. This modification consists chiefly in the use of the rhyme within the single stanzas themselves, which is wholly at variance with the original meaning of the form. Banville suggests that the stanza in this altered condition has been imitated from Petrarch. But he is quite mistaken. Petrarch, although he ostentatiously avoided reading Dante’s works, has in this instance exactly followed Dante’s example. Besides, he was too well acquainted with the musical significance of the stanza in question, not to know that all the lines must be _rims escars_, or, according to Dante’s terminology, _claves_, that is, unmatched by rhymes in their own stanza. For a fuller account of these details I must again refer the reader to the technical portion of this book. In connection with the _sestina_ and its history in the _lingua di sì_, it may be mentioned that another important form of Dante’s, and generally of Italian, poetry, the sonnet, seems to have been of indigenous, not at least of Provençal, growth. The structure of a stanza of fourteen lines containing the well-known number and arrangement of rhymes, is in perfect accordance with the metrical principles practised by the troubadours, but the only specimen of the sonnet in the _langue d’oc_ was written by an Italian poet, Dante da Maiano. It is by no means a master-piece, and remarkable chiefly for the fact that all the rhymes are of the male or monosyllabic order, an arrangement not unfrequent in Provençal, but unprecedented in Italian; the latter circumstance being perhaps the reason why an Italian poet, writing in Provençal, adopted it. Against the Provençal origin of the sonnet would also seem to speak the fact, that the word is used without any technical restriction, merely as equivalent for a song: Un sonat fatz malvatz e bo, E re non say de qal razo. ‘I make a sonnet evil or good, what about I don’t know myself,’ says Guiraut de Bornelh, wishing to illustrate the wayward mood of a distracted lover. Of the poem of sixteen lines he thought no more than did Burns when he described Tam O’Shanter as ‘crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet.’