Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and Marlowe in _Hero and Leander_ were among the earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate. Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:--
It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect: The reason no man knows; let it suffice, What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said, 'Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;' And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him. He started up; she blushed as one ashamed; Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed. He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled: Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled. These lovers parlèd by the touch of hands: True love is mute, and oft amazèd stands. Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, The air with sparks of living fire was spangled; And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron, Heaved up her head, and half the world upon Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day).
The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough.