only about 1% of Shakespeare's blank verse). John Dryden and his contemporaries and followers likewise occasionally employed them as the second (rarely the first) line of heroic couplets, or even more distinctively as the third line of a triplet. In his Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope denounced (and parodied) the excessive and unskillful use of this practice: Then at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. (lines 354-357) Other languages Spanish The Spanish verso alejandrino is a line of 7+7 syllables, probably developed in imitation of the French alexandrine. Its structure is: o o o o o S o | o o o o o S o It was used beginning about 1200 for mester de clerecía (clerical verse), typically occurring in the cuaderna vía, a stanza of four alejandrinos all with a single end-rhyme. The alejandrino was most prominent during the 13th and 14th centuries, after which time it was eclipsed by the metrically more flexible arte mayor. Juan Ruiz's Book of Good Love is one of the best-known examples of cuaderna vía, though other verse forms also appear in the work. Dutch The mid-16th-century poet Jan van der Noot pioneered syllabic Dutch alexandrines on the French model, but within a few decades Dutch alexandrines had been transformed into strict iambic hexameters with a caesura after the third foot. From Holland the accentual-syllabic alexandrine spread to other continental literatures. German Similarly, in early 17th-century Germany, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin advocated for an alexandrine with free rhythms, reflecting French practice; whereas Martin Opitz advocated for a strict accentual-syllabic iambic alexandrine in imitation of contemporary Dutch practice — and German poets followed Opitz. The alexandrine (strictly iambic with a consistent medial caesura) became the dominant long line of the German baroque. Polish Unlike many similar lines, the Polish alexandrine developed not from French verse but from Latin, specifically, the 13-syllable goliardic line: Latin goliardic: o o o s S s s | o o o s S s Polish alexandrine: o o o o o S s | o o o s S s s=unstressed syllable Though looser instances of this (nominally) 13-syllable line were occasionally used in Polish literature, it was Mikołaj Rej and Jan Kochanowski who, in the 16th century, introduced the syllabically strict line as a