been always characteristic of English writers, and never more so than in those troubled days,) expresses itself in serious moralization. In the lighter pieces, Surrey has a naïveté and grace which recall the youthful Dante's tender pictures of his more youthful lady-love in the Vita Nuova. And like Dante's, Surrey's is idealized passion; yet not so wrapt up in itself, (as with Shakespeare in his Sonnets,) but that the poet can connect or interweave his love with pictures of daily life. Many lines-most, perhaps-in language and sentiment, are perfectly modern,-rather, are of all time: far less mannered than we often find the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—not to say our own. A few lines may be quoted from The Faithful Lover, perhaps the most delicate song Surrey has left us of youthful melancholy, of high-bred reverie, almost persuading one that the passion was truly felt as well as truly painted.

If care do cause men cry, why do not I complain ?

If each man do bewail his woe, why show not I my pain?
Since that amongst them all, I dare well say is none

So far from weal, so full of woe, or hath more cause to moan.
For all things having life, some time hath quiet rest;
The bearing ass, the drawing ox, and every other beast;
The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays;

The ship-boy and the galley-slave have time to take their ease;

* If we may ascribe to Surrey_the_piece printed by Tottel in 1557 as uncertain," entitled The Lover describeth his whole state unto his love, and beginning

The sun when he had spread his rays,

I should place this as his finest achievement as an amourist : delicacy, passion, description of nature, are here united in a piece which does not fall far below the Allegro or Penseroso. But the evidence is doubtful: nor does Surrey, in his recognized work, ever quite seem to me to reach the perfection here shown.

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THE PREDECESSORS

Save I, alas! whom care, of force, doth so constrain

To wail the day, and wake the night, continually in pain.
From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears,

From tears to plainful plaint again; and thus my life it wears.

*

And when I hear the sound of song or instrument

Methink each tune there doleful is, and helps me to lament. And if I see some have their most desired sight,

"Alas!" think I, “each man hath weal, save I, most woful wight."

Then, as the stricken deer withdraws himself alone,

So do I seek some secret place, where I may make my moan; There do my flowing eyes shew forth my melting heart,

So that the streams of those two wells right well declare my

smart.

Very different, however, is the tone of really wounded affection in the elegiac pieces commemorating Surrey's friend Wyatt; he

That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit.

Our literature, in the three centuries and a half since, has little of such condensed praise, at once so manly and so tender. The pure voice of Nature speaks throughout this short poem; it is hence, also, purely English; hardly a word or a turn of thought obsolete. Its simplicity, and freedom both from exaggeration and mannerism, place it at once above elegies to which art and ornament have given much greater celebrity; and few at twenty-five have written so well.

Surrey's Vergilian translation, according to Hallam, is the earliest introduction of "blank verse " into our poetry. The narrative is admirably presented, and there is a charm in the simple closeness of the version by virtue of which Surrey is nearer Vergil than most of his later translators. The metre, as must naturally occur in a first experiment, wants modulation. Of attempt

to render or to replace the exquisite touches of the original, the Maronian magic, there is no sign. But who, indeed, in that field has ever succeeded? who without folly may hope for success?

A truly wonderful achievement, this little book, for the few and distracted years of the writer,—and the scaffold before him as his sovereign's reward for loyal service! Surrey's work has the best spirit of chivalry,

-even beyond Sidney's, beyond Spenser's, deeply tainted as at least the latter is by Elizabethan servility. Surrey's rejection of trivial phrases; his power, whilst preserving simplicity, never to drop into the prosaic, his use of classical and Italian poetry not in the mere ornamental manner of most Renaissance writers, made him a natural model in style; and whilst these merits explain the many editions of his poems which rapidly followed that of 1557 (eight are enumerated by 1587), this popularity, we may fairly add, does great credit to the taste of his countrymen.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, a man at least thirteen years senior to Surrey (died 1542), spent most of his life also in the public service, and was only known by publication in the Tottel's Miscellany of 1557, where his poems follow his friend Surrey's. Wyatt's work (the actual date of which, as of Surrey's, can hardly ever be given), is often more primitive in style; the Sonnets especially have greatly the air of early imitations from Petrarch, though in reading them it is best not to remember the originals. A lighter touch appears in the Rondeaux; a more modern rhythm; these little poems, although somewhat monotonous, rise at times to a great elegance in the simple expression of feeling. Here also Wyatt

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THE PREDECESSORS

displays considerable power in satire; his love (or loves) have little of Surrey's sweet ideality. Wyatt, to use a modern phrase, is in every way more "realistic" than his friend; his passion has not the disinterested character of Sidney's chivalrous temperament. His satirical epistles, on the other hand, have more irony, knowledge of mankind, and point: the language is remarkably clear and direct, and the verse in general free from archaic rudeness. His "best poem in this

style," says Hallam, " is a very close imitation of the tenth Satire of Alamanni": published in 1532.

But it is in the Odes that Wyatt, perhaps less hampered by foreign models, reaches his highest quality as a poet; and in these his skilful use of the refrain is especially noteworthy. What has been said of Surrey's style, in point of simplicity and clearness, applies to Wyatt's; the main difference being that he is less influenced by Renaissance elegance; he pushes absence of ornament to baldness; the one writes as an able man of the world, the other as the forerunner of Sidney. Hence the English didactic element, the seriousness of the race, becomes too prominent in Wyatt his Odes have an elegiac rather than a lyrical movement. These characteristics were easier to seize than Surrey's; and we accordingly find Wyatt's style largely reproduced in the other numerous poems contained in Tottel (1557), and in that other early authority, the Paradise of Dainty Devises; which, though published in 1576, seems to represent in general, not the movement which was headed by Spenser and Watson, but that which began with Wyatt and Surrey.

It is noteworthy that, in case of these two poets,

as afterwards of Sidney, whilst we have some record of their active life, and letters from them regarding their public careers, not one syllable (so far as I have been able to ascertain) relating to their literary aims and studies can be discovered. To this melancholy dearth of that information which we are most anxious to possess I shall return hereafter. Here I notice that as we have evidence from his official letters that Wyatt was in Barcelona (accredited Ambassador to Charles V) twice during the year 1538, there is reasonable ground for supposing that he may have there met with the Barcelonese poet Boscan, who, (according to Bouterwek,) was then residing in honour and court-favour at his birthplace. As Boscan did for the poetry of Spain precisely what Surrey mainly, but Wyatt also in his degree, did for English poetry,-naturalizing Italian Renaissance models, strenuous to follow classical form, writing lyrics and Horatian epistles,-the parallelism between the two men is very close, and suggests that they may probably at least have met as friends on the ground of intellectual sympathy. Boscan's poetry was published about the time of his death, in 1543.

Space does not allow me here to examine closely these invaluable Canzonieri,* which, with the later and more distinctly Elizabethan anthologies, would form a body of early poetry no way beneath their Italian predecessors, if our collectors had not, as a rule, excluded two or three of the greatest poets from their pages. But I may note that Grimald, in Tottel's

* Tottel's (1557) has been reprinted by Chalmers and by Mr. Arber; and reprints, more or less accessible, of the Paradise (1576), the Phoenix Nest (1593), the Helicon (1600), the Rhapsody (1602), exist.