ed in 1321.[4] But the
Italian language affords earlier examples. (The multitude of identical
cadences renders it a more easy and proper metre to use in Italian than
in English verse.)

No species of verse appears to have been more eagerly and universally
cultivated by the Italian poets, from the fourteenth century to the
present times. Even the gravest of their epic and tragic writers have
occasionally sported In these lighter bays. (A long list of them is
given in the beginning of the fourth Volume of Quadrios History of
Italian Poetry.) But perhaps the most elegant Italian sonnets are yet to
be found in Dante. Petrarch's sonnets are too learned (metaphysical) and
refined. Of Dante's compositions in this style I cannot give a better
idea, than in (the ingenious) Mr. Hayley's happy translation of Dante's
beautiful sonnet to his friend Guido Calvacanti [sic], written in his
youth, and probably before the year 1300.

Henry! I wish that you, and Charles, and I,
By some sweet spell within a bark were plac'd,
A gallant bark with magic virtue grac'd,
Swift at our will with every wind to fly:

So that no changes of the shifting sky
No stormy terrors of the watery waste,
Might bar our course, but heighten still our taste
Of sprightly joy, and of our social tie:

Then, that my Lucy, Lucy fair and free,
With those soft nymphs on whom your souls are bent,
The kind magician might to us convey,

To talk of love throughout the livelong day:
And that each fair might be as well content
As I in truth believe our hearts would be.[5]

We have before seen, that the _Sonnet_ was imported from Italy into
English poetry, by lord Surrey and Wyat, about the middle of the
sixteenth century. But it does not seem to have flourished in its
legitimate form, till towards the close of the reign of queen Elisabeth.
What I call the legitimate form, in which it now appeared, was not
always free from licentious innovations in the rythmical arrangement.

To omit Googe, Tuberville [sic], Gascoigne, and some other petty writers
who have interspersed their miscellanies with a few sonnets, and who
will be considered under another class, our first professed author in
this mode of composition, after Surrey and Wyat, is Samuel Daniel. His
_Sonnets_ called _Delia_, together with his _Complaint of Rosamond_,
were printed for Simon Waterson, in 1591.[6] It was hence that the name