nothing superior to his prologue to the Seventh Book of his translation, and Lindsay wrote nothing superior to the following. He has walked out well wrapt up in cloak and hood, with "double shoen" on his feet, and "mittens" on his hands : : "I met Dame Flora, in dule1 weed disaguised, With stalwart storms her sweetness was surprised; The small fowles in flockës saw I flee, They said—Blessed be Summer with his flowers, Alas, Aurora! the silly lark gan cry, Where hast thou left thy balmy liquor sweet, O fair Phoebus, where is thy wholesome heat? Where art thou, May, with June, thy sister sheen, And gentle July, with thy mantle green, Now old and cold Januar, in despite, Reaves from us all pastime and pleasure. Alas! what gentle heart may this endure? O'ersoiled are with cloudes odious Changing in sorrow our song melodious, Whilk we had wont to sing with good intent, Resounding to the heavenes firmament; But now our day is changed into night. With that they rose and flew out of my sight." In the course of his dream, Lindsay is conducted by Remembrance -not so very appropriate a personification in this case-to hell, but his description of it is entirely subordinate to satirical purposes, and contains about as little grandeur as could possibly be thrown into any verses on the situation. He proceeds at once to the popes, emperors, cardinals, prelates, priors, abbots, friars, 3 Cursed. 1 Doleful. 2 Low. 4 Endurest. monks, clerks, priests, and "bings" or heaps of all sorts of churchmen, and specifies the causes of their perdition with an eye to personages still in the land of the living. Lindsay probably took the idea of this visit to the nether regions from Douglas's translation of the Æneid. 6. NORTH-COUNTRY BALLAD-MAKERS. The border-land between England and Scotland was the scene of many tragedies of daring exploits, violent outrages, fierce acts of vengeance; and the feuds, loves, and humours of the robust Borderers, if they found no great poet to commemorate them, found many sympathetic minstrels whose simple and often powerful verses were committed by oral recitation to the memories of the common folk. It was not till the middle of last century that any attempt was made to collect and print these popular treasures, and consequently we cannot be sure that we have any pieces as old as the fourteenth or even the fifteenth century in their original form. They must have been more or less modernised, if not otherwise altered, as they passed from minstrel to minstrel, and from one generation of reciters to another. Still, there is reason to believe that there were current in the North Country during those centuries, ballads upon most of the themes in our extant balladliterature: Border battles such as Chevy Chase and Otterburne ; freebooting raids by such heroes as Kinmont Willie and William of Cloudesly; outrages such as that committed by Edom of Gordon; tragical jealousy, love between the children of enemies, love between high and low, stepmother cruelty, deadly mistakes, such as we find in the ballads of Young Waters, Helen of Kirkconnell, Clerk Saunders, the Child of Elle, Annie of Lochroyan, Gil Morice, and many others; the mysterious dealings of fairies with such heroes as Tamlane and True Thomas. In short, there circulated in that wild border-land in the ballad form, and steeped in a superstitious atmosphere of thrilling omens and apparitions, such tales as afterwards formed the material of English tragedy and the romantic drama. And yet two curious things are to be remarked: that the North Country never produced a great dramatist; and that no great English drama, with the exception, perhaps, of Macbeth, was based upon the incidents commemorated in these ballads. H 114 CHAPTER III. RENAISSANCE AND TRANSITION. MOST of the poets discussed in this chapter received their main impulse from Italy. We have seen how the impulse given by Chaucer directly and through his immediate disciples gradually died away, sinking into the inane repetitions of Hawes, or awakening the more individual energies of Skelton or Lindsay, who paid only a formal allegiance to the ruling powers, and substantially followed their own personal will: and we have now to deal with a more varied literature, which was largely influenced by the study of Italian. Not that Italian influences only were operative on the writers embraced in this chapter, but these were the main influences. Nor did our poets follow at the heels of Italian masters with slavish imitation: still, they received from Italian masters their most potent stimulus. Wyat, Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, and even Spenser, while preserving their individual and national characteristics, formed themselves upon Italian models much more than upon any previous productions of the English imagination. Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, but containing the poetical efforts of the preceding quarter of a century, marks an epoch in English poetry. A collection of songs and sonnets by the courtiers of Henry VIII., it is a fit spring prelude to the great Elizabethan season of somewhat uncertain glory like April itself, struggling out with its sunshine and bird-singing through clouds and rain, yet on the whole victorious in hiding the rotten wrecks of winter with fresh vegetation. It was a hopeful thing for those days that the enthusiasm of poetry had seized upon the Court: before this time, though several noblemen had extended their patronage to poets, no person of rank in England had endeavoured to sing for himself. The new "courtly makers," as Puttenham calls them, of whom the two chiefs were Sir Thomas Wyat and Henry Earl of Surrey, had "travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy," and came home filled with the Tottel's zeal of "novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch." Love was the natural theme of these ardent disciples of the gay science; and Petrarch was their model. Miscellany is our first collection of love-lyrics and after the droning narratives and worn-out rhymes of Lydgate and Hawes, the "depured streams," ‚""golden beams," and "fiery leams," these eloquent and freshly worded complaints of the malice and treachery of Cupid are a blessed relief. It is not hard to discern general causes that must have favoured this brilliant efflorescence of English genius. The case of James I. of Scotland shows that a century before the time of Henry VIII., the royal families at least received some sort of literary education. But if we may trust the statement of Erasmus, it was not till the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth that the English nobility began to be solicitous about the education of their children, and to engage as tutors the most eminent scholars that were to be procured. We may therefore suppose that about the middle of the reign of Henry VIII., our "young barbarians began to revel in the spirit of newly-acquired freedom from ignorance, and like the French after the Revolution, thirsted for an outlet to their energy. Their king had been educated under Skelton, a poet, however eccentric, and had imbibed among his many accomplishments a love for the generous arts. The cultivation of poetry at the Court of Scotland might have shamed them into exertion; but abroad they had in the brilliant Court of Lorenzo de Medici the traditions of a nobler example to excite their emulation. The interest of literary Europe had for some time centred in Italy. The tutors of the young English nobility had gone there to study the ancient classics under masters whose patient enthusiasm had gained the key to those treasures; and coming home brimful of the Italian scenery and the Italian manners, as well as the wonderful old learning, had created among their pupils a universal desire to travel into this Land of Promise, and see its marvels with their own eyes. And there the youthful travellers found and brought to England with them a treasure more valuable even than had been imported by their sage instructors: they found a new literature, palpitating with fresh life, and they were fired with ambition to emulate its beauties in their own tongue. This secondary and accidental result of the revival of learning was of more value to our literature than the primary movement itself: the most profound and wide-reaching impulses come from living sources. Why poetry at the Court of Henry took the form of songs and sonnets is a more perplexing question. Petrarch was probably known to Chaucer and to Lydgate; but they were not moved by his example. I can venture on no deeper explanation than that Petrarch suited the taste of Wyat and Surrey as Boccaccio suited the taste of Chaucer and Lydgate. One might speculate at length and plausibly on the why and the wherefore, but with little satisfaction to one's self and probably less to one's readers. Among the poets included in this chapter most of the great Italians found congenial disciples: Sackville studied Dante; Gascoigne translated from the plays of Ariosto and the prose tales of Bandello; and Spenser owed considerable obligations to the romantic epics of Ariosto and Tasso. I do not see that you can account for the choice of master except by supposing a natural affinity in the individual pupil. I. SIR THOMAS WYAT (1503-1541). The names of Surrey and Wyat are usually placed together as two great reformers of English verse, and often in such a way as to convey the impression that Wyat was the humble friend and imitator of Surrey. A close attention to dates and other circumstances leads us to reverse this position of the chieftains.' Whoever was the first of Henry's "courtly makers," it seems tolerably clear that Wyat was the poetical father and not the pupil of Surrey. Wyat was born in 1503. He was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1515, the year before the supposed date of Surrey's birth. In 1525, when Surrey was nine years old, and was living at Kenninghall under the care of a tutor, Wyat took a leading part in a great feat of arms at Greenwich, and was a favourite of Henry on account of his wit. There is a tradition that shortly afterwards he went to travel in Italy; but this fact does not rest on contemporary authority. In 1537 he was sent as ambassador to the Court of Charles V. in SpainSurrey's age at this time being twenty-one. Seeing that from 1537 till his premature death in 1541, Wyat was with short intervals closely occupied in public business, we may reasonably presume that most of his poetry was written before 1537; we may at least be certain that he had studied French, Italian, and Spanish, and had begun the practice of poetry, before that date. If we suppose Surrey to have been the prime mover of Wyat's literary activity, we must suppose that accomplished young nobleman's influence on his senior to have begun at a very early age, and to have worked its perfect work before he was one-andtwenty. The thing is not perhaps impossible; but it is much more likely that the influence proceeded the other way. In proof thereof, we may notice that Surrey addresses Wyat with the reverence of a pupil, thus "But I that knew what harboured in that head, What virtues rare were tempered in that breast, |