John:
Without an OED at hand, I can't guess when "numbers" came to be used as a
synonym for metrical feet.
The OED's earliest instance in this sense if Love's Labour's Lost (1588) -
just in time for Spenser. Interestingly, its first use in the sense of
'Musical periods or groups of notes' comes just 9 years earlier - in E.K.'s
October gloss for the Shepheardes Calendar, where the context is
appropriately Platonic/Pythagorean.
Charlie
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