^ 1 MELANCHOLY HOUES. 315 



utterly repuj^nant to the nature of our language, while 

 at present it is the popular vehicle of the most admired 

 tentiments of our best living poets. This remarkable 

 mutation in the opinions of our countrymen may, how- 

 n-er, be accounted for on plain and common principles. 

 The earlier English sonnetteers confined themselves in 

 general too strictly to the Italian model, as well in the 

 disposition of the rhymes as in the cast of the ideas. A 

 lonnet with them was only another word for some meta- 

 [iln'sical conceit, or clumsy antithesis, contained in fuur- 

 Ijen harsh lines, full of obscure inversions and ill-man- 

 .iged expletives. They bound themselves down to a pat- 

 tern which was in itself faulty, and they met with the com- 

 mon fate of servile imitators in retaining all the defects 

 of their original, while th y suffered the beauties to escape 

 in the process. Their sonnets are like copies of a bad 

 picture : however accurately copied, they are still bad. 

 Our contemporaries, on the contrary, have given scope to 

 their genius in the sonnet without restraint, sometimes 

 even growing licentious in their liberty, setting at defi- 

 ance those rules which form its distinguishing peculiarity, 

 and, under the name of sonnet, soaring or falling into 

 ode or elegy. Their compositions, of course, are im- 

 pressed with all those excellences which would have 

 marked their respective productions in any similar walk 

 of poetry. 



It has never been disputed that the sonnet first arrived 

 at celebrity in the Italian : a language which, as it 

 abounds in a musical similarity of terminations, is more 

 eminently qualified to give ease and elegance to the 

 legitimate sonnet, restricted as it is to stated and fre- 

 quently-recurring rhymes of the same class. As to the 

 inventors of this little structure of verse, they are in- 

 volved in imxpenetrable obscurity. Some authors have 

 ascribed it singly to Guitone D'Arezzo, an Italian poet 

 of the thirteenth century ; but they have no sort of au- 

 thority to adduce in support of their assertions. Ar- 

 guing upon probabilities, with some slight coinciden 

 tal corroborations, I sliould be inclined to maintain tha{ 

 its origin may be referred to an earlier period ; that it 1 

 ^^ " ^i 



