Touch aie o string, or aie o warble harpe,
And with Glaskyrion the Briton strive,
Were his nailes poincted nevir so sharpe,
It shoulde makin every wight to dull
To heare his glee, and of his strokes full.
The addition refers to a celebrated ancient Welsh harper mentioned with honour by Chaucer himself in his Boke of Fame. I shall not further meddle by patchwork with the illustrious Father of English Poetry. But, as in the former case, by the addition of two lines and one word I could at once convert his stanza into that of Spenser. The ottava rima was not then invented, nor for many years after Chaucer wrote, not having made its appearance until the days of Boiardo and Berni, nor been brought to perfection until the lyre was held by the master hands of Ariosto and Tasso. The secret of the great resemblance of this stanza as employed by Chaucer to that subsequently invented by his Italian successors is, that both delved in the same mine and wrought upon the same material—the Sicilian sonnet, first introduced and naturalized in Europe by Chaucer’s great contemporary, Petrarch. So perfect was this instrument, the sonnet, at its discovery, that the fine taste of Petrarch adhered to it throughout life with marvellous tenacity, and at this day Wordsworth has without change written nearly half his poetry in it. I believe Chaucer, who either copied or adapted many of his modes of versification from Petrarch, to have moulded his ballet-staves both of seven and eight, by squaring them with the first half of the Sicilian or Petrarcan sonnet, with which they are nearly identical. The Italian successors of Petrarch in the same way took the first half of the sonnet, transposing the first and second lines, and inserting another line between the fourth and fifth lines. Thus simply is derived the far-famed ottava rima.
In real fact and truth, Chaucer has had nearly as much share in the formation of what is known as the stanza of Spenser as Spenser himself. That stanza is purely the ballet-stave of eight with three close rhymes—with the simple addition by Spenser of an Alexandrine at the close, rhyming with the last verse of the ballet-stave. There are some who trace these ballet-staves to the Latin rhymed church iambics, and the germ of the ballet-stave of eight has been sought in a Latin hymn written by the German monk, Ernfrid, in the ninth century; but they are to be traced more probably (at least in their more perfect shape) to the Romance poetry of the Provençals. The first instance I meet with of the use of the ballet-stave of eight in English verse is in the elegy on the death of our first Edward, written from internal evidence shortly after that period. The rhymes and their arrangement are precisely as in the stanza of Spenser, but the verse is octosyllabic:
Alle that beoth of huerte trewe
A stounde herkneth to my song
Of duel that deth hath diht us newe