SIR,—Mr. McCombe may be correct in recalling that Meredith did
not apply the term " sonnet " to the sixteen-line poems in his cycle " Modern Love "; but he is falling into an error of generalisation in supposing that " it has been always held that sonnets in English should contain fourteen lines, neither more nor less."
That has certainly become the accepted length, but in the early days of English sonneteering, when Watson, Spenser and Sidney were spreading in England the spirit of poetic revival which they had encountered an the Continent, the eighteen-line sonnet was not uncommon. For instance, in Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia of 1582, the majority of the hundred poems are of eighteen lines, and, although they really consist of three sestets, self-contained both in sense and rhyme-structure, the author
expressly styles them sonnets.—Yours faithfully, S. V. PESKETT. 9a Union Road, Cambridge.
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