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Rh But Wyatt (1503–1542) was long considered the father of modern English verse, and though we now plainly enough perceive that before his day all the essential discoveries and inventions had been made, he nevertheless deserves great honour as a pioneer. He introduced, from France and Italy, the prosodical principles of the Renaissance—order and coherency, concentration and definition of sound—and that although his own powers in metre were far from being highly developed. He and his more gifted disciple Surrey introduced into English verse the sonnet (not of the pure Italian type, but as a quatorzain with a final couplet) as well as other short lyric forms. To Surrey, moreover, we owe the introduction from Italian of blank verse, the rhymeless metre of five accents, which has taken so prominent a place in subsequent English poetry.

With the heroic couplet, with blank verse, and with a variety of short lyric stanzaic measures, the equipment of British verse might now be said to be complete. For the moment, however, towards the middle of the 16th century, all these excellent metres seemed to be abandoned in favour of an awkward couplet of fourteen feet, which may have had some relation with the French alexandrine. It was always, as Saintsbury says, “a very uncertain and risky metre, settling down with a dangerous acquiescence into doggerel and sing-song.” It was to break up this nerveless measure that the remarkable reforms of the close of the century were made, and the discoveries of Wyatt and Surrey were brought, long after their deaths, into general practice. In drama, the doggerel of an earlier age retired before a blank verse, which was at first entirely pedestrian and mechanical, but struck out variety and music in the hands of Marlowe and Shakespeare. But the central magician was Spenser, in whom there arose a master of pure verse whose range and skill were greater than those of any previous writer of English, and before whom Chaucer himself must withdraw. It is not too much to say that Spenser took all the elements of English verse, as they had existed in more or less timid and undeveloped shape for four centuries, and that he moulded them together into an instrument capable, for the first time, of expressing, or accompanying, every passion, every emotion, every variety of sentiment or instinct, which stirs the human breast. His great work was that of solidification and emancipation, but he also created a noble form which bears his name, that Spenserian stanza of nine lines closing with an alexandrine, which lends itself in the hands of great poets, and great poets only, to magnificent narrative effects.

It was at this moment that a final attempt was made to disestablish the whole scheme of English metre, and to substitute for it unrhymed classic measures. In the year 1579 this heresy was powerful at Cambridge, and a vigorous attempt was made to include Spenser himself among its votaries. It failed, and with this failure it may be said that all the essential questions connected with English poetry were settled.

There is enough to fill a score of volumes in the mode in which the poets from Spenser downwards have employed the laws of English verse, but he was the latest of the legislators who laid down the framework of those laws. It is not possible in this place to enter into such themes as the rise and fall of Elizabethan dramatic blank verse; the perfection of the song and the development of the sonnet; the extraordinary virtuosity of Milton; the contest between enjambement (which permits the extension of the sentence beyond the limits of the distich) and the couplet as introduced by Waller; the victory of that couplet, and its use from 1670 to 1800; the slow growth of ode, which had been one of Spenser’s inventions; the revivals of prosodical taste in the 19th century; the extraordinary advance in freedom of anapaestic movement.

It may generally be remarked in connexion with the very various, copious and often chaotic criticism of English verse, that it has been a misfortune, from the earliest times, that pedantic and chimerical theories have too often invaded the study of metre. They had tended, from the times of the Alexandrian grammarians down to our own, to treat as a dead thing that vivid and elastic art of poetry whose very essence is its life.

In modern times not a few theorists have allowed themselves to diverge into the most extraordinary chains of musical and even of mathematical conjecture and have been easily led, in the practice of their ingenious learning, to forget that what they are talking about is the vehicle in which tremulous and ardent thoughts are conveyed to the hearts of men. The poet knows the law by instinct, but he treats it as a living guide; he varies the pause, he manipulates the accent, he gives the vital element of freedom to the verse which he has founded upon discipline. It is extremely doubtful whether any youthful poet was even helped by prosodical instruction; his earliest measures are imitative; he does not compose consciously in “tribrachs” and “iambs”; he would gape in astonishment if asked to define the “pyrrhichian hypothesis”; his bursts of enthusiasm are not modified by a theory of “trisyllabic equivalence.” The old formula of verse, “variety in unity,” holds good in all languages, countries and times; the delicate rapture involved in a brilliant combination of rhyme and metre is a matter which is regulated; indeed, on a consideration of the laws of prosody, but depends on other and wider qualities of a moral and an aesthetic order.

.—Richard Bentley, Schediasma de metris Terentianis (Cambridge, 1726); R. Volkmann, Rhetorik und Metrik der Griechen und Römer (ed. Gleditsch, Berlin, 1901); Wilhelm Christ, Metrik der Griechen und Römer (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1879) J. L. Ussing, Graesk og romersk Metrik (Copenhagen, 1893); Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms (new edition, edited by W. W. Skeat; London, 1882); George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (3 vols., London, 1906–9); J. Schipper, Englische Metrik (2 vols., Bonn, 1881); J. B. Mayor, Chapters on English Metre (Cambridge, 1901); T. S. Omond, English Verse-Structure (London, 1897); Metrical Rhythm (London, 1905); Théodore de Banville, Petit traité de prosodie française (2nd ed., Paris, 1872); Robert de Souza, Le Rhythme poétique (Paris, 1892); L. E. Kestner, A History of French Versification (Oxford, 1903); T. Casini, Le Forme metriche italiane (Florence, 1900); E. Benot, Prosodia Castellana i versification (3 vols., Madrid, 1902). (E. G.)&emsp;  VERSECZ (Ger. Werschetz), a town of Hungary, in the county of Temes, 235 m. S.S.E. of Budapest by rail. Pop. (1900) 25,199. It has a handsome parish church and is the seat of a Greek Orthodox bishop. Versecz is one of the principal wine-producing centres in Hungary, and the red wines and brandy produced here enjoy a great reputation. Near the town are remains of a Roman castle, and a Roman rampart and trench which extend for about 60 m. to the north. During the revolutionary period of 1848–49 the Hungarians defeated the Servians here on the 11th of July 1848, while on the 19th of January 1849 the town was occupied by the Austrian troops.  VERTEBRATA, a large branch of the animal kingdom, of which the characteristic members are mammals, birds, reptiles, batrachians, fish and cyclostomes, the craniate vertebrates of modern zoology. These include all the animals which possess “vertebrae,” pieces of bone or cartilage jointed to form a “backbone” or spinal column (see ), although in some of the lower members of the group the segmentation of the spinal column is imperfect. That such animals formed a natural group was understood from the earliest times. Aristotle placed them together as “Enaima,” or sanguineous animals, distinguishing them from the “Anaima,” which he believed to be bloodless. Later it was discovered that the so-called bloodless animals contained uncoloured blood, and the vertebrates were distinguished as red-blooded, until G. L. C. F. D. Cuvier showed the existence of red blood in some other animals. C. Linnaeus made Mammalia, Aves, Amphibia and Pisces the first four classes of the animal kingdom, but suggested no corporate name for them. In 1788 A. J. G. K. Batsch united them into a great division, for which he proposed the name “Knochenthiere,” bony animals. J. B. P. Lamarck carried the idea further, and first clearly recognized the importance of the vertebral column in classification; to him is due the division of the animal kingdom into Vertebrata, which included all the craniate vertebrates, and Invertebrata, which included all other animals. These names and the dichotomy they imply have persisted from their convenience, although zoological science has come to recognize that the groups are not morphologically