the founders of modern English poetry-Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547).

Sir Thomas Wyatt.-The career of Wyatt illustrates particularly the value to English literature of the close connection with foreign countries, which Henry VIII.'s ambition to take part in European affairs did much to restore. Wyatt was frequently abroad on diplomatic missions; like Chaucer he visited Italy, and also Spain and France. His poems are, for the most part, translations and imitations of Italian poetry, especially of Petrarch's sonnets in praise of Laura. With Petrarch's imitators the sonnet had become a mere literary exercise, devoted to the expression of a love which might be entirely imaginary, or directed toward an imaginary person. Wyatt's sonnets, therefore, need not be regarded as having strict biographical truth, though attempts have been made to find in them the history of a personal relation, and some have guessed that they were inspired by Henry's second queen, Anne Boleyne. Wyatt's effort to achieve the regularity and finish of the Italian sonnet was not always successful. Yet in freer lyrical verse such poems as "My Lute, Awake," and "Forget not yet," are eminent examples of his power.

The Earl of Surrey.-Wyatt's companion poet, Surrey, born in 1517, and beheaded in 1547, is, like More, notable for his personal quality. He has all the exuberance of the age, a perpetual charm of youth and promise, as his brilliant figure passes through the sunlight and shadow of Henry's court, moving gracefully and carelessly to the scaffold which awaited him. Surrey, like Wyatt, rendered his chief service to English literature by enriching its resources with foreign forms, and especially by his introduction of blank verse, in his translation of two books of Virgil's Eneid. Blank verse had been used in Italy a few years before in a translation of the same work, from which experiment Surrey may have obtained the suggestion, but the happy skill with which he adopted it, and thus gave to English poetry its most powerful and characteristic verse form, is worthy of all praise. To Surrey also is due the English form of the sonnet which Shakespeare used, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet.

"Tottel's Miscellany."-The work of these literary courtiers was intended for private circulation in manuscript. By the middle of the century, however, there had grown up a demand on the part of the reading public which publishers attempted to supply by volumes of miscellaneous verse. The first of these collections, "Tottel's Miscellany," contained the poems of Wyatt, Surrey, and several of their followers. It appeared in 1557, a date which marks the public beginning of modern English verse.

The Reformation. The fact that both Wyatt and Surrey, the introducers of Renaissance poetry, wrote also religious verse, emphasizes the fact that in England the Renaissance and the Reformation were nearly contemporary. The formal beginning of the Reformation in Europe is dated from 1517, when Martin Luther nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg his attack upon the power of the Pope. The doctrines of the German and Swiss reformers spread rapidly through England. When in 1534 King Henry VIII. quarrelled with the Pope, who refused to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, he found the people at large ready to support him in his proclamation of himself as Head of the Church, and later in his suppression of the monasteries.

The Reformation was the chief political question in the closing years of the reign of Henry VIII., and indeed throughout the rest of the century. Henry was strong enough to hold a moderate course between the reformers and the adherents of the old faith. After his death in 1547, the former controlled the policy of the boy-king, Edward VI., and pushed their advantage by persecution and bloodshed. When the king died in 1553, they tried to retain power by setting up as queen the Lady Jane Grey, but the mass of the nation accepted the claim of Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII. by his first and Catholic wife. In her five years of rule she did her utmost to restore the old faith, outdoing the reformers in the cruelty of her persecution. At her death in 1558, she was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, though of the reformed faith, was inclined to keep a middle course between the two religious parties. However, the movement in

Europe known as the Catholic Reaction was now in full progress under the leadership of Philip II., of Spain. His efforts to stamp out the Reformation in France and the Netherlands, and his support of the claims of Mary Queen of Scots to the crown of Elizabeth, gradually forced England into open hostility to Spain, which the queen signalized by sending troops to help the Dutch revolt against Philip, and by beheading the Queen of Scots in 1586. Philip's response to this challenge was the Spanish Armada, which he sent against England in 1588.

The Literature of the Reformation. The Reformation had a very important influence on English life. Coming at the time when the Renaissance was drawing men into ardent love of the present world and stimulating their ambition to master it and to enjoy it, the Reformation brought home the thought of the other world, and checked the spirit of selfishness and self-indulgence by enforcing anew the claim of religion. This influence is reflected in the literature of the time, especially the popular literature. The Reformation was to the common people what the revival of learning was to the upper classes: it set the most important topic for discussion, and called into being a simple native English style which could be understood by all. The best example of this style is to be seen in the translation of the Bible by William Tyndale, of which the New Testament appeared in 1526. This was eagerly circulated by the reformers, in spite of the efforts of the authorities to prevent it. Ten years later, when the king himself had turned against the Pope, Miles Coverdale was authorized to revise Tyndale's translation of the scriptures, and his version, completed in 1538, was placed by royal sanction in the churches all over England, where the great volumes, chained to the pillars, were read to the crowds of unlettered folk. Thus the English Bible came to be the strongest influence on English popular prose, for which it supplied a model in opposition to the artificial styles imitated from foreign or classic literature.

Foxe's "Book of Martyrs."-Next to the Bible the most popular work of the time was the Book of Martyrs (1563) of John Foxe. This was a genuine text-book of the Refor

mation; from it we gain those accounts of the martyrs of Mary's reign, of Hooper and Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, which are among the best known passages of English history. In its plain, literal style it reflects the strenuous temper of the thorough-going reformers. Its stern realism brought home to Englishmen the cruel struggle by which the new faith survived, and its eloquent accounts of spiritual triumph roused the moral enthusiasm of the nation, and prepared the way for Puritanism.

III. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH

The Spirit of the Time. The accession of Elizabeth in 1558 changed the entire aspect of the nation. Her moderate policy relaxed the religious tension; the gloomy spirit produced by the persecutions was lightened; the force of the Renaissance manifested itself more widely, as the spirit of individual freedom and of cager response to all the new opportunities of the world. It was an age of romantic adventure, which led men into intellectual speculation and commercial enterprise, which sent them to explore the unknown seas of the north, the mysterious rivers and forests of the new world, or drew them into the scarcely less exciting life of London. But the impulses of the time which made for personal and selfish ends were both directed and kept in check by a corresponding growth of patriotism. Elizabeth's reign united the nation, and her personal presence gave it a visible sign of unity. The championship of the reformed faith, moreover, came to be regarded by a large part of the people as a national duty, and the conquest of lands beyond the seas as a national opportunity. When in course of time the pursuit of these ends brought England into open conflict with Spain, the country passed through an experience as dramatic as that of Athens at Marathon; after a long period of suspense the strain was relieved by the wonderful repulse of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The national feeling, made so intense by danger and victory, shines through the literature of the time. The cager, instinctive patriotism of the people found utterance in the choruses of Shakespeare's

Henry V. and in such noble lyrics as Michael Drayton's "Ballad of Agincourt," the ringing metre of which Tennyson used afterward in "The Charge of the Light Brigade." The more conscious political virtue, which touched with high purpose the lives of Sidney, of Essex, and of Raleigh, is reflected in Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Lyly's "Euphues."-The beginning of the great period of Elizabethan literature may be dated from 1579, the year of the publication of the most famous prose work of the time, Lyly's Euphues and also of Spenser's decisive appearance as a poet in The Shepherd's Calendar. The former, though now little read, deserves mention as the best illustration of the narrowly literary ideals of the age.

John Lyly (1553-1606) was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he seems to have gained the reputation of being a trifler-"the fiddlestick of Oxford," an enemy called him. His superficial cleverness, however, enabled him to write a successful account of the culture of the period, in Euphues or the Anatomy of Wit (1579), and its sequel, Euphues and his England (1580). Together they form a work of fiction in which an exceedingly slight plot serves to connect a succession of conversations, letters, and essays, treating such subjects as love, education, religion, and manners. The book illustrates the interest of the time in intellectual development, restrained, however, by the feeling, stirred by the Reformation, that "vain is all learning without the taste of divine knowledge."

The artificial language which Euphues and his friends. talked, and which became a literary fashion, is the characteristic of the book for which it is remembered to-day. Among Lyly's mannerisms the most remarkable is the arrangement of words in antithesis, the contrast being marked by alliteration, thus: "Although I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shunne thee hereafter as a trothless foe." Another peculiarity is his lavish use of similes drawn from what passed for natural history, as: "The milk of the Tygresse, that the more salt there is thrown into it the fresher it is." Euphuism was but one form of a widely diffused tendency in Renaissance literature, an attempt to prove the