bassador to the Court of Charles V. Historical students will realise the delicacy of this somewhat ineffectual mission and of his subsequent embassy to Paris on the same errandthe restoration of a diplomatic understanding between Henry and the Emperor, who had been affronted in the person of his divorced aunt, Katharine of Aragon. Owing to the machinations of Bonner, Bishop of London, who had been sent out to join him in the first embassy, Wyatt was again committed to the Tower on the charge of a treasonable correspondence with Cardinal Pole. After languishing there for some months, he was acquitted before the Privy Council, having delivered a masterly speech in his own defence, and restored to Henry's favour. He died of a fever at his house of Sherborne, and was probably buried in the Abbey Church hard by. Wyatt's poetry is essentially erudite: his reading was wide, and he used many models. But, putting aside his classical and Influence of contemporary sources-several passages in his work the Italian bear close analogies to passages in Horace-the sonnet on influence which shines through all his principal Wyatt. pieces is that of Petrarch. It is not necessary here to give an account of the sonnet form, the earliest perfect specimens of which may be easily studied by everybody in Rossetti's book of translations, Dante and his Circle. Petrarch (1304-1374), devoting himself almost exclusively to this artificial and expressive form of verse, gave it an indelible character, and stamped it for all future ages. The work of Petrarch is always brilliantly ingenious; but the subjective and metaphysical tendency of the sonnet, and, above all, its formidable grammar of construction, render it anything but spontaneous. This was the author whose manner Wyatt imported into England. His own sonnets, as may be expected, are laboured, and often depend upon the merest conceits, some of them tortured and threadbare to a degree. In one poem he compares his love to a stream falling from the Alps; in another epigram he likens his heart to an over-charged gun. But through all his poetry there runs an artless vein of native simplicity; there are moments when the exotic wealth of Petrarch is forgotten, and the poet relies upon his native riches. Outside the sonnets he displays a wonderful charm and variety of metre, and a capacity (which certainly is not Italian) for vehement and terse lyric writing. His little lyrics-canzoni, as the Italians call them-have a novel freshness and ease; they seem to herald that manner which was so readily cultivated and perfected by the Jacobean poets; they have, in short, style, spontaneity, and finish. Original merit of Wyatt's poetry. Other in fluences discernible A beautiful and somewhat foreign characteristic of these pieces is their fondness for a repeated phrase, amounting to a refrain: this connects Wyatt with Clément Marot (who, by the way, was only eight years older than himself, and died two years later) and the in Wyatt. later Valois school of poetry. With all this natural talent, mingled with a surprising love of art, we have still an echo of the earlier English poets-the eternal cry to the lover to arise and "do his observance" to the month of May, the appeal which Chaucer and the rest had converted into a formula. Such traces of the Chaucerian spirit are not uncommon; and occasionally Wyatt's verse relapses into a descriptive garrulity unknown to Petrarch. For instances of this it is worth while to consult his extremely fine and masculine version of the Penitential Psalms and study his account of David's sorrow. His poetry, composed of these conflicting elements, is a precious legacy whose value can hardly be overrated. § 9. Bound up with the first edition of Wyatt's poems, which was printed by John Tottel in his Miscellany (1557), were the songs and sonnets of HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY, son of Thomas, third Duke of SURREY (1517-1547). Norfolk. Surrey's life is a collection of doubtful incidents. Its main facts are these. He was educated in true knightly fashion. While still very young he married Lady Frances Vere, daughter of the Earl of Ox ford. At Court he was the chosen companion His life. of Henry VIII's natural son, the young Duke of Richmond, who became his brother-in-law in 1533 and died in 1536. Surrey's early fame rose rapidly he was the picked knight of the time; and round his exploits at tournaments grew the romantic story of his joustings in Italy, and his championship of the Fair Geraldine. Two or three times his youthful ardour brought him into prison; and a very significant index to his religious views is the fact that one of these imprisonments was a penalty for eating flesh in Lent, and that its original cause was a poetical attack on London, in which he imitated Petrarch's magnificent sonnet on Rome, Fontana di dolore, albergo dira. His chief exploit abroad was his defence of Boulogne, from which he was recalled in 1546. The sordid family tragedy which followed his recall is a sad piece of backstairs history. It is enough to say that Surrey, accused by the Earl of Hertford, and attainted of high treason, was thrown into the Tower and beheaded on January 19, 1547. The frivolous charge on which he was executed was that he had quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor on his shield! He was buried in All Hallows, Barking, but his body was afterwards removed to the Howard Chapel at Framlingham in Suffolk. Surrey's love-poetry belongs, for the most part, to the pleasant years between 1533 and 1536 when he was with the Duke of Richmond at Windsor-years spent in athletic pursuits and trifling gallantry. Criticism seems unwilling to demolish the story of the Fair Geraldine, whose name is as inseparable from Surrey's as Laura's is The Fair from Petrarch's; but although there is no positive evidence against his passion, the only evidence for it is one charming sonnet written in a manner reminiscent of Dante's beautiful Ognissanti sonnet. Geraldine was certainly Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the ninth Earl of Kildare; she was married twice the second time to Lord Edward Clinton, afterwards Earl of Lincoln. Surrey asserts that he met her at Hunsdon, near Ware, where the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth were being educated at the time. She was, however, only nine years old then, while Surrey was a married man; and it is more probable that his sonnet to her was simply a compliment, and that the rest were indiscriminately addressed to the numerous heroines of— "The large green courts where we were wont to rove, And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love." Surrey imitated Petrarch and, in so doing, was Wyatt's pupil. Nevertheless his style is more natural than Wyatt's. He is less easily led into conceits. Certainly any reminiscence Surrey's style. of the Trojan war brought on a serious attack of the Comparison kind, and in one canzone he consoles himself for his with Wyatt. present pains by meditating on the ten years' toil of the Greeks for Helen. This was a singularly elaborate thought! Again, in his song concerning the lady who refused to dance with him, he commits himself to a tedious, involved, and needless metaphor. This is the exception, for, as a rule, his use of simile and metaphor is curiously unskilled, and is preserved by its dignity alone from being prosaic. His sense of natural beauty, too, was keen, and his sense of colour was almost as fine as that of Propertius or, among later poets, of Keats. Moreover, in metrical excellence and in lyric fluency he was the equal of Wyatt; but his metre underwent less variety, and is, on the whole, much less flexible. One very favourite metre of Surrey's is the ponderous iambic measure, consisting of alternate long and short lines, the long containing fourteen, and the short twelve syllables. This, with its long ambling motion and awkward breaks, is inestimably wearisome. But in Wyatt's own department of the sonnet we have no hesitation in saying that Surrey was vastly the better of the two poets. His sonnets run with a singular smoothness; their style is dignified and restrained; and some of them, the fine poem on Sardanapalus, for example, have a stately movement and unanimity of volume which places them among the highest successes of their kind. And it is certain that there is nothing in Wyatt, and very little in all the remainder of Tudor poetry, which can be compared with Surrey's noble and pathetic lines upon the death of his friend and fellow-poet. Surrey brought the sonnet a step nearer Shakespeare. He also used blank verse with daring originality in his translations of Virgil's second and fourth Æneids. Thus he has two claims ture. upon our attention. His name is inseparable from that of Wyatt, and they naturally provoke comparison. But the fact that Surrey is the more natural, the smoother, the more lovable, the less eccentric poet of the two, is Importance of Wyatt nothing to Wyatt's discredit. Wyatt is the writer and Surrey who inaugurated the new style: Surrey followed in literahim closely; and both helped to pave the way for Shakespeare. Both represented, in more than one way, the Renaissance spirit, for both were anything but attached sons of the Church, and in their predilection for the new opinions they would find common ground. Wyatt, indeed, was the father of that Sir Thomas Wyatt who raised disturbances in Mary's reign. The events, too, in the life of the one bear a curious resemblance to the events in the life of the other. Wyatt's misfortunes are simply intensified in Surrey's tragedy. Ballads. § 10. We cannot better conclude our sketch of the transition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than by making a few remarks on a peculiar class of compositions which, in England, are unusually plentiful, are marked with an intense impress of nationality, and have exerted, on modern literature in particular, an extraordinary influence. These are our national Ballads, produced, it is probable, in great abundance during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in many cases owing their origin to the "North Countree," or Border region between England and Scotland. This district, the scene of incessant forays, English and Scottish alike, during the uninterrupted warfare between the two countries, was naturally the theatre of a multitude of wild and romantic episodes, which were consigned to memory in the rude strains of native minstrels. Spain, indeed, in the delightful romances of the Christian and Moorish struggle and in the collection which forms the cycle of the Cid, is the only country in the possession of anything similar in kind or comparable in inerit to the old ballads of England. Their manner of composition bears a close analogy to those heroic songs of wandering minstrels, the oral Rhapsodies, from which the material of the Homeric poems is derived. Such minstrels -often blind, or otherwise shut out from active life-gained their bread by extemporising or by makers. repeating legendary songs. As a class, these poets and narrators were very different from the Troubadours and Jongleurs of Southern Europe and the French Courts of Love. The Emperor Frederick II, who gloried in being a Troubadour, would never have condescended to the position of an English ballad-maker. However, these wanderers, in a country ruder and less chivalrous, but not less warlike than Languedoc or Provence, made songs which are inimitable for simple pathos, hot intensity of feeling, and picturesqueness of description. In every country there must exist some typical or national form of versification, adapted to ENG. LIT. The ballad G Metre of the ballads. the genius of the language and to the mode of declamation or musical accompaniment which is employed to assist the effect. Thus Hellenic legendary poetry naturally took the form of the Homeric hexameter: Spanish poetry naturally adopted the loose assonante versification, which was so well adapted to a guitar accompaniment. Almost without exception the English ballads affect the iambic measure of twelve or fourteen syllables, rhyming in couplets; so that, by the casura or pause, they naturally divide themselves into stanzas of four lines, the rhymes generally occurring in the second and fourth. This form of metre, which predominates throughout all these interesting relics, was evolved from the old, long, unrhymed, alliterative measure of Piers Plowman and earlier poems. The breaking-up of the lines at the casura, transforming two into four, seems to have been nothing but a convenient method of copying the long lines into a narrow page; while the readiness with which the lines thus divide themselves may be observed by a comparison with the long metre of the old German Nibelungenlied, in which the same system of division and rhyme can be followed. Later collections of ballads. Composed by obscure and often illiterate poets, these productions were frequently handed down orally from generation to generation, and orally only. It is to the taste and curiosity of private collectors, and perhaps to their family pride, that we owe the accident by which some of them were copied and preserved. The few that were printed, being destined exclusively for the poorest class of readers, were circulated in mean type and on flying sheets or broadsheets. Vast numbers of them -some perhaps of the first order-have perished; and the system of oral communication has doubtless corrupted the text of those that have come down to us. The first considerable collection of these ballads is contained in the most valuable and excellently annotated volume known as Percy's Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published by "Reliques." Bishop Percy of Dromore, at that time vicar of Easton Maudit, in 1765. It is to this prelate's example that we owe, not only the preservation of these invaluable remains, but the immense revolution produced, by their study and imitation, in our modern literature. For these old English ballads, without exaggeration, had the greatest share in that change of taste and feeling which is known as the romantic revival; and the most popular leader of the movement, Scott himself, owed his inspiration to his devoted and enthusiastic study of the works of the Border rhapsodists. Like the Homeric lays or the Spanish romances, with which they bear analogies of construction, these ballads abound in certain regularly recurring passages, turns of expression, and epithets-the orthodox stock-in-trade of the composer; but these common |