HEROIC VERSE, a term exclusively used in English to in dicate the rhymed iambic line or HEROIC COUPLET. In ancient literature the heroic verse was the hexameter. It was in this measure that the Iliad and Odyssey and the Aeneid were written. In English, however, it is not enough to designate a single iambic line of five beats as heroic verse because it is necessary to distin guish blank verse from the distich, consisting of two rhymed lines, each of_ ten syllables. In French the Alexandrine has always been regarded as the heroic measure of that language. The cur rent form of English heroic verse appears to be the invention of Chaucer, who used it in his Legend of Good Women, and of ter wards, with still greater freedom, in the Canterbury Tales. He was followed nearly a century later by the Scottish poet, called Blind Harry (c. 1475), whose Wallace holds an important place in the history of versification as having passed on the tradition of the heroic couplet. Another Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, se lected heroic verse for his translation of the Aeneid (1513) and displayed, in such examples as the following, a skill which left little room for improvement at the hands of later poets:— "One sang, `The ship sails over the salt foam, Will bring the merchants and my leman home' ; Some other sings, `I will be blithe and light, Mine heart is leant upon so goodly wight.' " The verse so successfully mastered was, however, not very gen. erally used for heroic purposes in Tudor literature. The early poets of - the revival, and Spenser and Shakespeare after greatly preferred stanzaic forms. For dramatic purposes blank verse was almost exclusively used, although the French had adopted the rhymed Alexandrine for their plays. In Elizabethan England heroic verse was often put to somewhat unheroic pur poses, mainly in prologues and epilogues, or other short poems of occasion; but it was nobly redeemed by Marlowe in his Hero and Leander and respectably by Browne in his Britannia's Pas torals. It is to be noted, however, that those Elizabethans who, like Chapman and .Drayton, aimed at producing a warlike and Homeric effect, did so in shambling '4-syllable couplets. The one heroic poem of that age written at considerable length in the appropriate national metre is the Bosworth Field of Sir John Beau mont (1582-1628). Since the middle of the 17th century, when heroic verse became the typical and for a while almost the solitary form in which serious English poetry was written, its history has known many vicissitudes. After having been the principal instru ment of Dryden and Pope it was almost entirely rejected by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but revised, with various modifica tions, by Byron, Shelley (in Julian and Maddalo), and Keats (in Lamia). In the second half of the 19th century its prestige was restored by the brilliant work of Swinburne in Tristram and elsewhere. Alfred Noyes, in Drake, and G. K. Chesterton, in Le panto, varied the rhythm and increased the sonority of the line.