"The poem," he says, in the Preface, "may be considered as a metrical experiment." In _Beppo_, and the two first cantos of _Don Juan_, he had proved that the _ottava rima_ of the Italians, which Frere had been one of the first to transplant, might grow and flourish in an alien soil, and now, by way of a second venture, he proposed to acclimatize the _terza rima_. He was under the impression that Hayley, whom he had held up to ridicule as "for ever feeble, and for ever tame," had been the first and last to try the measure in English; but of Hayley's excellent translation of the three first cantos of the _Inferno_ (_vide post_, p. 244, note 1), praised but somewhat grudgingly praised by Southey, he had only seen an extract, and of earlier experiments he was altogether ignorant. As a matter of fact, many poets had already essayed, but timidly and without perseverance, to "come to the test in the metrification" of the _Divine Comedy_. Some twenty-seven lines, "the sole example in English literature of that period, of the use of _terza rima_, obviously copied from Dante" (_Complete Works of Chaucer_, by the Rev. W. Skeat, 1894, i. 76, 261), are imbedded in Chaucer's _Compleint to his Lady_. In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ("Description of the restless state of a lover"), "as novises newly sprung out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch" (Puttenham's _Art of Poesie_, 1589, pp. 48-50); and later again, Daniel ("To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford"), Ben Jonson, and Milton (_Psalms_ ii., vi.) afford specimens of _terza rima_. There was, too, one among Byron's contemporaries who had already made trial of the metre in his _Prince Athanase_ (1817) and _The Woodman and the Nightingale_ (1818), and who, shortly, in his _Ode to the West Wind_ (October, 1819, published 1820) was to prove that it was not impossible to write English poetry, if not in genuine _terza rima_, with its interchange of double rhymes, at least in what has been happily styled the "Byronic _terza rima_." It may, however, be taken for granted that, at any rate in June, 1819, these fragments of Shelley's were unknown to Byron. Long after Byron's day, but long years before his dream was realized, Mrs. Browning, in her _Casa Guidi Windows_ (1851), in the same metre, re-echoed the same aspiration (see her _Preface_), "that the future of Italy shall not be disinherited." (See for some of these instances of _terza rima_, _Englische Metrik_, von Dr. J. Schipper, 1888, ii. 896. See, too, _The Metre of Dante's Comedy discussed and exemplified_, by Alfred Forman and Harry Buxton Forman, 1878, p. 7.)