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Verse, or unrhymed verse, is the name applied to the iambic pentameter, or heroic verse, the regular measure of English dramatic and epic poetry. The first specimen of it in English is a translation of the 2nd and 4th books of Virgil’s Acneid, by the Earl of Surrey; but Italian and Spanish writers had used it at the beginning of the x6th century. The English version was not published till the middle oj that century. Two short poems by Nicholas Gnmald published in 1557, arc the first specunens of original blank verse. The five-foot iambic was early used by Italians and French, but it was not freed from the restraint of rhyme, as it was in England, by die middle of the 1 6th century. Milton, Long fellow, Tennyson. Browning, and Swinburne, all use it, Milton s Paradise Lost being the first great poem in our literature so written. _