Metre (poetry) words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrine, with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone, classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules,
Alexandrine 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: <poem style="margin-left:2em"> 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) </poem> The Spanish "alejandrino" is a line of 7+7 syllables, probably developed in imitation of the French alexandrine. It was used beginning about 1200 for