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 1586; but he is not known to have published any before the dedicatory verses at the opening of The Faerie Queene in I59O, 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."

Daniel is the only English poet who adopts the rhyming of Spenser in any of his sonnets; 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 and Sir David Murray; Mure of Rowallan uses it in twenty-five or thirty sonnets' In Scotland it is frequently the form adopted by occasional and amateur practitioners, often with a view apparently of pleasing the King.