li
1586;[1] but he is not known to have published any before the dedicatory verses at the opening of The Faerie Queene in I59O,[2] and by this time he would have been familiar with the King's reputation as a patron, and doubtless also with his verse. It is not in any case a matter to be settled by the relative merits of the writers concerned. Either James or Montgomerie, with their fondness for intricate and frequent rhyming, might have invented the scheme by following Gascoigne's statement that "the first twelve [lines] do ryme in staves of four lines by crosse meetre, and the last two ryming togither do conclude the whole."[3]
Daniel is the only English poet who adopts the rhyming of Spenser in any of his sonnets;[4] but it is found more frequently among Scottish writers, and is in such cases a sign of the influence of James and Montgomerie. The Hudsons and Fowler employ it exclusively in the scanty collections of their verse which have survived; there are five or six examples scattered among the poems of Sir William Alexander[5] and Sir David Murray;[6] Mure of Rowallan[7] uses it in twenty-five or thirty sonnets' In Scotland it is frequently the form adopted by occasional and amateur practitioners, [8] often with a view apparently of pleasing the King.
- ↑ A sonnet to Harvey (Globe ed., p. 607) is dated July 18, of this year.
- ↑ It has often been noticed that the Spenserian stanza is precisely the first nine lines of the Spenserian sonnet, with an additional foot at the end. One might easily, therefore, have been developed from the other. If, however, the stanza is to be traced to others of similar length, it should be compared, not with ottava rima, which Spenser employs nowhere save in Muiopotmos, but with the French octave, abab, bcbc, which he uses frequently. This was even more popular in Scottish poetry than in English, and was one of the favorite staves of Scott, Maitland, Montgomerie, and other contemporaries of James.
- ↑ Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. I, p. 55.
- ↑ In eight sonnets, Works, ed. Grosart, Vol. I, pp. 17, 35, 49, 59, 60, 223, 277.
- ↑ Works, ed. 1870-1872, Vol. I, pp. 38, 46. For another by Aytoun, cf. p. xxix.
- ↑ Poems, Bann. Club, XV and XVIII of the sonnets to Cœlia. Also a commendatory sonnet by Simon Grahame prefixed to Sophonisba.
- ↑ Works, S. T. S., Vol. I, pp. 47-58, 301-306.
- ↑ Among others, three sonnets by James Melville in Vita et Morte Roberti Rollok, Bann. Club reprint; six by Walter Quin on the heroes of the Gowry
