division of the fourteen lines into two quatrains, forming eight lines of opening, and two terzettes, forming six lines for the delivery of the thought. He observed that there should be only two rhymes running through the two quatrains, that the second quatrain should echo the rhyming of the first, and that the two rhymes have, with Petrarch, an arrangement that he preferred and seldom departed from (abba). Wyatt observed also that there should be three rhymes running through the two terzettes. Surrey not merely ended his sonnets with couplets, but was essentially irregular in the arrangement of their rhymes. Here, for instance, is one of Wyatt's sonnets:

A RENOUNCING OF LOVE.

Farewell Love! and all thy laws for ever;
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore
To perfect wealth my wit for to endeavour.
In blind errour when I did perséver,

Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore,
Taught me in trifles that I set no store,
But scape forth thence, since liberty is lever.'
Therefore, farewell! go, trouble younger hearts,
And in me claim no more authority.
With idle youth go use thy property,

And thereon spend thy many brittle darts;

For, hitherto though I have lost all my time, Me list no longer rotten boughs to clime.

His fellow-poet, the Earl of Surrey, wrote these lines

ON THE DEATH OF SIR THOMAS WYATT.

Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest:
Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain;
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast:
Such profit he by envy could obtain.

A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame; Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, As on a stithe, where that some work of fame Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain.

Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey were, in Henry VIII.'s reign, the first introducers of the Sonnet into English Literature. Wyatt, the elder man, was also a more exact imitator of the form of the sonnet as the practice of Petrarch had maintained and established it. The Earl of Surrey's imitations of the Petrarchan sonnet were defective as to their mechanism in several respects. Wyatt overlooked only one condition, namely, that the last two lines should not rhyme as a couplet; and for his use of a closing couplet he had authority in the practice of Dante's contemporary, Cino da Pistoia, and of other Italian masters. In Wyatt's sonnets there is always a couplet at the close, in Petrarch's Otherwise Wyatt observed accurately the

never.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was about fourteen years younger than Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, and survived him but five years, was the elder son of Thomas, Earl of Surrey, by his second wife, daughter of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Henry Howard became Earl of Surrey in 1526, at the age of about seven, when his father succeeded to the dukedom of Norfolk. Two years later the boy served as cupbearer to King Henry VIII., and from the time when he was fifteen he was in regular attendance upon the king's person. His father loved literature; his mother had been an especial friend to Skelton; and the Earl of Surrey soon acquired fame at court as a poet who could write skilfully in the Italian fashion, and vigorously too in his own way as a high-spirited, energetic, and somewhat headstrong young lord. His exercises in the writing of loveSonnets were inscribed to a little girl at court, the

1 Corpse (French "corps"), the body. In old English, not necessarily the dead body.

She

Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, whose family claimed affinity with the Tuscan line of the Giraldi of Florence. Gerald Fitzgerald and his five uncles had risen in rebellion; he had been made prisoner, and attainted as a traitor. He died in the Tower in 1534, leaving little Elizabeth (Surrey's "Geraldine"), aged six, an object of compassion to the court. was brought to England, and placed at Hunsdon with her second cousin, the Princess Mary. The Earl of Surrey was then seventeen years old, and had been contracted in marriage, a year or two before, to the Earl of Oxford's daughter, Lady Frances Vere. In the following year, 1535, when Surrey's age was eighteen, and Geraldine's was seven, Surrey married. In 1536 his first son, Thomas, was born; and in 1539 his second son, Henry. Geraldine also married early, and was Lady Antony Brown, though but nineteen years of age, in 1547, the year of Surrey's

execution.

It had always been required that sequences of sonnets showing a poet's skill in running up and down. the scale of the one chiefly-appointed theme, should be inscribed to ladies who were not in any close personal relation of love to the poet. Without that understanding, reputations would have been continually compromised. Ladies were, doubtless, as unwilling then as now to be courted aloud on the housetops, and the old Courts of Love had, in fact, kept strict guard over the line between publicity of rhyming and the privacies of personal affection. Dante's Beatrice first appears in his sonnets as a child of eight, and she died young, Simon dei Bardi's wife, to whom honour was added by the poet who associated her with his ideal verse. Laura was in her eighteenth year when she married Hugues de Sades, and she was the mother of eleven children when she died at the age of about forty, Petrarch still celebrating her in a form of verse by which no one could be offended, because in its own day it was seldom misunderstood. The world never saw a line of verse written by Dante to his own wife, or by Petrarch to the mother of his son John and his daughter Francesca. Following, therefore, what had become an established fashion, when Surrey proved his courtly skill in the writing of love-sonnets, he dedicated them, not to his wife-his words to her were for her ear alonebut to a child of the court, whom it was kindly to distinguish as the theme of his exercises in conventional love rhetoric. The following sonnet is that which proves Elizabeth Fitzgerald to have been the Earl of Surrey's Geraldine :

:

DESCRIPTION AND PRAISE OF HIS LOVE GERALDINK

From Tuscane came my lady's worthy race;

Fair Florence was sometime their ancient seat. The western isle whose pleasant shore doth face Wild Camber's cliffs, did give her lively heat. Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast:

Her sire an earl, her dame of prince's blood. From tender years, in Britain doth she rest, With king's child; where she tasteth costly food. Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyne:

Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.

Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;

And Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight. Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above; Happy is he that can obtain her love!

The next piece will serve to illustrate Surrey's skill as an imitator of Petrarch. It is translated from Petrarch's first canzone, which is placed between his tenth and eleventh sonnets, and consists in the original, as here, of fourteen lines, although it is not a true sonnet in its structure. It is, nevertheless, as near an approach to a sonnet as anything else left us by Surrey :

COMPLAINT THAT HIS LADY, AFTER SHE KNEW OF HIS LOVE, KEPT HER FACE ALWAY HIDDEN FROM HIM.

I never saw my lady lay apart

Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat,
Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great;
Which other fancies driveth from my heart,
That to myself I do the thought reserve,

The which unwares did wound my woful breast;
But on her face mine eyes might never rest.
Yet since she knew I did her love and serve,
Her golden tresses clad alway with black,
Her smiling looks that hid thus evermore,
And that restrains which I desire so sore.
So doth this cornet govern me alack!

In summer, sun, in winter's breath, a frost;
Whereby the light of her fair looks I lost!

In 1542 Surrey served under his father, who led an English force across the border, and was at the burning of Kelsal. After his return he was imprisoned awhile in the Fleet for breaking citizens' windows. One of his two comrades in that freak was the only son of Wyatt the poet, Thomas Wyatt the younger, who was about three years younger than Surrey, and who was executed in 1554 for rebellion against the marriage of Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. Surrey playfully excused his offence of window-breaking in this

SATIRE AGAINST THE CITIZENS OF LONDON.

London! hast thou accuséd me

Of breach of laws? the root of strife!
Within whose breast did boil to see,
So fervent hot, thy dissolute life;
That even the hate of sins that grow
Within thy wicked walls so rife,
For to break forth did convert so,

That terror could it not repress.
The which, by words since preachers know
What hope is left for to redress,
By unknown means it liked me
My hidden burthen to express.
Whereby it might appear to thee

That secret sin hath secret spite;
From Justice' rod no fault is free,
But that all such as work unright
In most quiet, are next ill rest.

In secret silence of the night
This made me, with a reckless breast,
To wake thy sluggards with my bow:

A figure of the Lord's behest,

Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures shew. That as the fearful thunder's clap

By sudden flame at hand we know;

Of pebble stones the soundless rap,

The dreadful plague might make thee see Of God's wrath that doth thee enwrap.

That Pride might know, from conscience free,

How lofty works may her defend;
And Envy find, as he hath sought,
How other seek him to offend:

And Wrath taste of each cruel thought
The just shape, higher in the end:
And idle Sloth, that never wrought,
To heaven his spirit lift may begin:

And greedy Lucre live in dread,
To see what hate ill got goods win.
The lechers, ye that lusts do feed,
Perceive what secrecy's in sin:

And gluttons' hearts for sorrow bleed,
Awakéd, when their fault they find.

In loathsome vice each drunken wight
To stir to God, this was my mind.
Thy windows had done me no spight;
But proud people, that dread no fall,
Clothed with falsehood and unright
Bred in the closures of thy wall,

Wrested to wrath my fervent zeal
Thou hast; to strife, my secret call.
Induréd hearts no warning feel.

O shameless! is dread then gone?
Be such thy foes, as meant thy weal?
O member of false Babylon!

The shop of craft! the den of ire!
Thy dreadful doom draws fast upon.
Thy martyrs' blood by sword and fire,
In heaven and earth for justice call.

The Lord shall hear their just desire!
The flame of wrath shall on thee fall!
With famine and pest lamentably
Stricken shall be thy lechers all;

Thy proud towers, and turrets high
Enemies to God, beat stone from stone;
Thine idols burnt that wrought iniquity;
When none thy ruin shall bemoan.
But render unto the righteous Lord,
That so hath judged Babylon,

Immortal praise with one accord.

In October, 1543, the Earl of Surrey was a volunteer with the army in France before Landrécy. In the following July, 1544, he went to the wars again, and, as marshal of the English camp, he conducted the retreat from Montreuil. In August, 1545, he crossed the Channel again in command of an expedition for defence of Boulogne. He was recalled from Boulogne in April, 1546; found enemies at court; and in December, 1546, was arrested and sent to the Tower. A royal quartering in his arms was made the ground of an accusation of treason, and in the last days of Henry VIII., on the 21st of January, 1547, only a week before the king's death, the Earl of Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill. His father, who had also been arrested, escaped a similar end because his death-warrant was not yet signed when King Henry died.

A much-loved follower of Surrey's was Thomas Clere, youngest son of Sir Robert Clere, of Ormesby, in Norfolk, and Alice, daughter of Sir William Boleyn. Clere, whose family traced its origin back to the counts of Cleremont, in Normandy, before the Conquest, was present at the coronation of his cousin, Anne Boleyn; loved a daughter of Sir John Shelton, in Norfolk; but died, aged twenty-eight, of a hurt received while he was protecting his wounded master from danger at one of the gates of Montreuil. was buried in a chapel at Lambeth, with these lines by the Earl of Surrey placed over his tomb :

EPITAPH ON CLERE.

Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead; Clere, of the Count of Clerémont, thou hight; Within the womb of Ormond's race thou bred, And saw'st thy cousin crownéd in thy sight. Shelton for love, Surrey for lord thou chase;1

He

(Aye, me! whilst life did last that league was tender!) Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsal blaze,

Landrécy burnt, and battered Boulogne render. At Montreuil gates, hopeless of all recure,?

Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will; Which cause did thee this pining death procure, Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfil. Ah! Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost, Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost.

Surrey paraphrased some of the Psalms, and the first five chapters of Ecclesiastes. He also translated the second and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid into blank verse, a measure then being tried in Italy, and by him first introduced into our literature. These opening lines of the second book were the first lines of blank verse written in English: :

They whisted all, with fixéd face attent,
When prince Areas from the royal seat
Thus gan to speak. O Queen! it is thy will
I should renew a woe cannot be told:
How that the Greeks did spoil, and overthrow
The Phrygian wealth, and wailful realm of Troy:
Those ruthful things that I myself beheld;
And whereof no small part fell to my share.
Which to express, who could refrain from tears?
What Myrmidon? or yet what Dolopes?
What stern Ulysses' wagéd soldier?

And lo! moist night now from the welkin falls;
And stars declining counsel us to rest.
But since so great is thy delight to hear
Of our mishaps, and Troyè's last decay;
Though to record the same my mind abhors,
And plaint eschews, yet thus will I begin.

HOW NO AGE IS CONTENT WITH HIS OWN ESTATE, AND HOW THE AGE OF CHILDREN IS THE HAPPIEST IF THEY HAD SKILL TO UNDERSTAND IT.

Laid in my quiet bed, in study as I were,

I saw within my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear.
And every thought did shew so lively in mine eyes, [rise.
That now I sighed, and then I smiled, as cause of thought did
I saw the little boy in thought how oft that he
Did wish of God to scape the rod, a tall young man to be.
The young man eke that feels his bones with pains opprest,
How he would be a rich old man, to live and lie at rest.
The rich old man that sees his end draw on so sore,
How he would be a boy again, to live so much the more.
Whereat full oft I smiled, to see how all these three, [degree.
From boy to man, from man to boy, would chop and change
And musing thus I think, the case is very strange,
That man from wealth, to live in woe, doth ever seek to change.
Thus thoughtful as I lay, I saw my withered skin,
How it doth show my dented chews, the flesh was worn so thin.
And eke my toothless chaps, the gates of my right way,
That opes and shuts as I do speak, do thus unto me say:
"Thy white and hoarish hairs, the messengers of age,
That shew, like lines of true belief, that this life doth assuage;
Bid thee lay hand and feel them hanging on thy chin;
The which do write two ages past, the third now coming in.
Hang up therefore the bit of thy young wanton time:
And thou that therein beaten art, the happiest life define.”
Whereat I sighed, and said: "Farewell! my wonted joy;
Truss up thy pack, and trudge from me to every little boy;
And tell them thus from me: their time most happy is,
If, to their time, they reason had, to know the truth of this."

A CARELESS MAN SCORNING AND DESCRIBING THE SUBTLE USAGE OF WOMEN TOWARD THEIR LOVERS.

Wrapt in my careless cloak, as I walk to and fro,

I see how Love can shew what force there reigneth in his bow:
And how he shooteth eke a hardy heart to wound;
And where he glanceth by again, that little hurt is found.
For seldom is it seen he woundeth hearts alike;
The one may rage, when t'other's love is often far to seek.
All this I see, with more; and wonder thinketh me
How he can strike the one so sore, and leave the other free.
I see that wounded wight that suffereth all this wrong,
How he is fed with yeas and nays, and liveth all too long.
In silence though I keep such secrets to myself,
Yet do I see how she sometime doth yield a look by stealth,
As though it seemed, " Iwis, I will not lose thee so:"
When in her heart so sweet a thought did never truly grow
Then say I thus: Alas! that man is far from bliss,
That doth receive for his relief none other gain but this.
And she that feeds him so, I feel and find it plain,
Is but to glory in her power, that over such can reign.
Nor are such graces spent but when she thinks that he,
A wearied man, is fully bent such fancies to let flee.
Then to retain him still, she wrasteth new her grace, [brace.
And smileth, lo! as though she would forthwith the man em-
But when the proof is made, to try such looks withal,
He findeth then the place all void and freighted full of gall.
Lord! what abuse is this! Who can such women praise,
That for their glory do devise to use such crafty ways?
I, that among the rest do sit and mark the row,
Find that in her is greater craft, than is in twenty mo',
Whose tender years, alas! with wiles so well are sped:
What will she do when hoary hairs are powdered in her head?