ABSTRACT
From Rhetoricae Libri Duo (Oxford, 1598), sigs. C3 v-C4: Number in poetry is called rhythm or metre. Rhythm then is poetic number, containing a fixed total of syllables, and not contained by any quantitative principle. Natural rhythms of this sort are found in every nation and among all peoples. They are even to be discovered in Greece before Homer, and in Italy before Andronicus. And in modem times for the most part they rhyme, as in our Homer's poem. [quotes R T 11.400-406] And a little later [quotes R T 11.428-34] Careful reading in the best poets will show the different kinds of rhythm. [Butler's note reads:] Those amongst our poets most deserving of comparison with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, are Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and others, full of native talent and artistic skill (in both of which this age is fertile). First among them, the master of them all and the only lamp of his own dark age, is Master Geoffrey Chaucer.1
