BLANK VERSE, on the analogy of blank cartridge, etc., might be held to designate any kind of verse not tipped, loaded, or filled up with rhyme. As a matter of fact, however, and for sound historical reasons, it is not usually applied to the more modern unrhymed experiments, from Collins's "Evening" onwards, but is confined to continuous decasyllabics. This measure (which, _mutatis mutandis_, had already been used by the Italians and Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, and of which curious foreshadowings are found in Chaucer's prose _Tale of Melibee_ and elsewhere) was first attempted in English by the Earl of Surrey in his version of the _Æneid_. For a time it was very little imitated, but in the latter half of the century it gradually ousted all other competitors for dramatic use. It was still out of favour for non-dramatic purposes until Milton's great experiments in the later seventeenth; while about the same period it was for a time itself laid aside in drama. But it soon recovered its place there, and has never lost it; while during the eighteenth century it became more and more fashionable for poems proper, and has rather extended than contracted its business since.
BOB AND WHEEL.--An arrangement (see pp. 48, 49) by which a stanza hitherto usually alliterated, but not rhymed, finishes with one much shorter line of usually two syllables, and then a batch, usually four, of lines not quite so short, but still shorter than the staple, and rhymed among themselves.
BURNS METRE.--An apparently artificial but extremely effective arrangement of six lines, 8, 8, 8, 4, 8, 4, rhymed _aaabab_, which derives its common name from the mastery shown, in and of it, by the Scottish poet. It is, however, far older than his time, having been traced to Provençal originals in the eleventh century, and it is very common in the English miracle plays of the late fourteenth and fifteenth, and not unknown in the metrical romances, as in _Octovian Imperator_. Disused in Southern English by the time of the Renaissance, it seems to have kept its hold in Northern, and Burns received it either immediately from Fergusson or perhaps from Allan Ramsay. (See also below, in list of Form-origins.)