new subject matter of his series of Holy Sonnets. John Milton's sonnets constitute a special case and demonstrate another stylistic transition. Two youthful examples in English and five in Italian are Petrarchan in spirit. But the seventeen sonnets of his maturity address personal and political themes. It has been observed of their intimate tone, and the way the sense overrides the volta within the poem in some cases, that Milton is here adapting the sonnet form to that of the Horatian ode. He also seems to have been the first to introduce an Italian variation of the form, the caudate sonnet, into English in his prolongation of "On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament". 18th-19th centuries The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any were written between 1670 and the second half of the 18th century. Amongst the first to revive the form was Thomas Warton, who took Milton for his model. Around him at Oxford were grouped those associated with him in this revival, including John Codrington Bampfylde, Thomas Russell, Thomas Warwick and Henry Headley, some of whom published small collections of sonnets alone. Many women, too, now took up the sonnet form, in particular Charlotte Smith, whose lachrymose Elegiac Sonnets (1784 onwards) are credited with helping create the 'school of sensibility' characteristic of the time. William Lisle Bowles was also a close follower, but the success of both stirred up resistance in the poetic politics of the time. William Beckford parodied Smith's melancholy manner and archaic diction in an "Elegiac sonnet to a mopstick". In the preface to his 1796 collection Poems on Various Subjects, Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented of his series of "Effusions" that "I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles – a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float". There were formal objections too. Where most of the early revivalists had used Milton's sonnets as the model for theirs, Smith and Bowles had preferred the Shakespearean form. This led to Mary Robinson's fighting preface to her sequence Sappho and Phaon, in which she asserted the legitimacy of the Petrarchan form as used by Milton over "the non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters" that pass as sonnets