narrative carried forward over an enjambed eighth line to a conclusion that is limited to the final three lines. By the time the second half of the 19th century was reached, sonnets become chiefly interesting for their publication in long sequences. It was during this period that attempts to renew the form were continually being made. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's autobiographical Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845–50), for example, is described as the first depiction of a successful courtship since Elizabethan times. It comprises 44 sonnets of dramatised first person narrative, the enjambed lines in which frequently avoid resting at the volta. Through this means the work is distinguished by "the flexibility and control with which the verse bends to the argument and to the rhythms of thought and speech". That sequence was followed in 1862 by George Meredith's Modern Love, based in part on the breakdown of his first marriage. It employs a 16-line form, described as (and working like) a sonnet, linking together the work's fifty narrative episodes. Essentially the stanza is made up of four quatrains of enclosed rhyme, rhythmically driven forward over these divisions so as to allow a greater syntactical complexity "more readily associated with the realist novel than with lyric poetry". As other work by both the writers above demonstrates, they were capable of more straightforward fictions. In adapting the sonnet to the narrative mode, the main interest for them is in overcoming the technical challenge that they set themselves and proving the new possibilities of the form in which they are working. Where the first quatrain in Sonnets from the Portuguese began with a reminiscence of lines from a pastoral of Theocritus, Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855-1891) responded by reaching beyond the narrative mode towards the dramatic in the thirty adaptations from the Greek of his Echoes from Theocritus (1885, reprint 1922). Beyond this, though the idea of arranging such material in a sequence was original to Lefroy, Thomas Warwick had anticipated the approach a century before in his sonnet "From Bacchylides", equally based on a fragment of an ancient Greek author. On the other hand, Eugene Lee-Hamilton's exploration of the sonnet's dramatic possibilities was through creating historical monologues in his hundred Imaginary Sonnets (1888), based on episodes chosen from the seven centuries between 1120 – 1820. Neither sequence was anywhere the equal of those of Barrett Browning or Meredith, but they illustrate a contemporary urge