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Despondency is often his companion: he turns to his dumb dependants and fondles them with bitter reflection on the faithlessness of his human friends.

“Lux, my fair falcon, and thy fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty!
Ye not forsake me, that fair mote you fall.
But they that sometime liked my company,
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
Lo! what a proof in light adversity!
But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else."

Active cynicism-cynicism no longer mournful, but kindled into delight by its own exercise-is seen in Wyat's satires, written in imitation of Horace. There are three of them, all in the terza rima or banded three-line stave: their titles are, "Of the mean and sure Estate, written to John Poins," "Of the Courtier's Life, written to John Poins," and "How to use the Court and himself therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan." These are our first English imitations of Horace; and if Horace is taken as the standard of satire, Wyat has the best claim to the position of first English satirist, which is sometimes assigned to later satirists, Lodge, Donne, or Hall.

Although Wyat preceded Surrey, and should not be robbed of the honour of that position, it is not to be pretended that he had Surrey's ease and accuracy of expression. He has indeed occasional felicities of higher and more delicate charm than anything to be found in Surrey; single lines and parts of lines whose words have fallen together with the perfection of instinct. But he is in general awkward and embarrassed in his management of the complicated staves which he had the courage to attempt. His rhymes are exceedingly faulty, falling often upon unaccented inflectional terminations such as eth, ed, and ing, thus—

"I fare as one escaped that fleeth,

Glad he is gone, and yet still feareth
Spied to be caught, and so dreadeth
That he for nought his pain loseth."

He makes other rhyme with higher and her; maister with nature ; accited with tryed and presented. In some of his pieces nearly one-fourth of the rhymes are of this nature. His metre, also, is questionable. He employs words with their foreign accents, and, generally, seems to study only to have the proper number of accents. This is the most charitable supposition: it might be contended that he simply counts syllables and arbitrarily puts an accent upon every second syllable without regard to its acknow

ledged accent. And with all these licences he has some difficulty in filling up the measure of his stanzas. It is, however, only in his sonnets, and his compositions in terza rima and ottava rima, that these defects appear. His songs are no less flowing than Surrey's, and to the full as musical. In them he moves like a runner escaped from a thicket into the open plain. He "sends his complaints and tears to sue for grace" with genuine lyric rapture

"Pass forth my wonted cries

Those cruel ears to pierce,
Which in most hateful wise
Do still my plaints reverse.
Do you, my tears, also
So wet her barren heart,
That pity there may grow
And cruelty depart."

II. HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY (1516-1547).

The editor of Tottel's Miscellany speaks of "the honourable style of the noble Earl of Surrey, and the weightiness of the deep-witted Sir Thomas Wyat the elder's verse." There is some

discrimination in the epithets. Surrey has not the deep and subtle feelings of Wyat; but he has a captivating sweetness, a direct eloquence, a generous impetuosity, that make him a much more universal favourite.

Warton dwells at some length on Surrey's life as throwing light upon the character and subjects of his poetry. The prevailing errors in Surrey's biography may have had something to do with the misconception of his position in literature. If he had, as was at one time the accepted belief, been engaged in the battle of Flodden (three years before he was born), he might well have taken precedence of Wyatt. Warton does not fall into this mistake: but he affirms that Surrey was educated at Windsor with Henry's natural son, the Duke of Richmond; and repeats the fiction of Thomas Nash that Surrey made the tour of Europe as a knight-errant, upholding against all comers the superiority of his mistress Geraldine. The facts are these. From his birth till 1524, Henry Howard lived in his father's house-in the summer time at Tendring Hall, Suffolk, in the winter time at Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire he is not known to have been the companion of the youthful Duke of Richmond till their education (in the limited meaning of the word) was completed. Surrey's boyhood was probably passed at Kenninghall, under the care of a tutor: the pleasures that he recounts as passed in Windsor with a king's son in his childish years were probably not enjoyed till 1534, by which time both had been at Cambridge, had taken part in royal

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pageants, and had been married, or at least affianced, to noble ladies. His itinerant championship of Geraldine is purely fabulous. The lady is conjectured to have been Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare: but seeing that she was only four years old when Surrey married in 1532, and was herself married to Sir Anthony Brown at the age of fifteen in 1543, we may believe with Dr Nott that the passion was altogether ideal, and perhaps the effect rather than the cause of Surrey's turn for sonnet-writing. Belonging to the most powerful family in England, Surrey was a most prominent figure at Court: in the festivities at Henry's marriage with Anne of Cleves in 1540, he was the leader of one of the sides in the tournament. His imperious spirit more than once committed him to durance vile: once for challenging to a duel, and again for breaking the windows of the citizens of London under the pretence (serious or comical) of alarming their guilty minds with fear of approaching Divine vengeance. He held commands in the unimportant wars with Scotland and France that occupied the later years of the reign of Henry, and distinguished himself by his personal courage. In December 1546, at the instance of certain enemies, he was lodged in the Tower; and in the January following was brought to trial for high treason, condemned, and executed. He was charged with having "falsely, maliciously, and traitorously set up and bore the arms of Edward the Confessor."

Surrey is described as a somewhat small man, strongly knit, with a dark piercing eye and a composed thoughtful countenance. He was much more impetuous and gushing than Wyat: proud, confident, indiscreet in word and action: profuse in his expenses, sumptuous in apparel and mode of living: courteous and affable to inferiors, haughty to equals, and willing to acknowledge no superior.

Surrey's originality was not of the fastidious kind that rejects thoughts and images simply because they have occurred to a predecessor. His imagery is not strikingly new. In his irresistible energetic way he made free use of whatever suggested itself in the moment of composition, no matter where it might have come from. He borrowed many phrases, many images, and many hints of phrases and images, from his friend Wyat. What he bor

1 It will at once be asked-How do we know that Wyat was the lender and not the borrower? Apart from the probabilities of dates, we know from such small facts as the following: Surrey assigns to Wyat the significant figure that the scar of a severe wound is never effaced; and in the poem containing that figure we find several other expressions that are used by Surrey. Such a fact, of course, is not conclusive; it might plausibly be turned the other way. That it points in the way here indicated appears farther from the form of Surrey's reference; he quotes Wyat as a master:

"Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure :
But Wyat said true, the scar doth aye endure."

rowed, however, he passed through his own mint. He vividly realised in his own experience the feelings that other poets professed, and the imagery they employed to give expression to their feelings. At times, indeed, he seems like a spasmodic poet to be agitating himself for the sake of the experience. All his poetry thus displays a modified originality. He probably would not have observed what he delineates, nor would he have thought of the means of delineation, without an obtrusive stimulus, a broad hint ; but once his eyes were turned to the proper quarter, and he was told, as it were, what to look for, he used his own eyesight independently, and cast about him for the means of giving expression to what he saw and felt. He had an energetic, versatile mind, singularly open to impressions and impulses: versifying the moods and circumstances of love in songs and sonnets was merely one of the channels that his energy was guided into; and once set agoing he versified in his own way, just as in war he aspired to direct operations in his own way.

Compared with Wyat, Surrey strikes one as having much greater affluence of words the language is more plastic in his hands. When his mind is full of an idea, he pours it forth with soft voluble eloquence; he commands such abundance of words that he preserves with ease a uniform measure. Uniformity, indeed, is almost indispensable to such abundance: we read him with the feeling that in a "tumbling metre" his fluency would run away with him. Such impetuous affluent natures as his need to be held in with the bit and bridle of uniformity. A calm, composed man like Wyat, with a fine ear for varied melodies, may be trusted to elaborate tranquilly irregular and subtle rhythms; to men like Surrey there is a danger in any medium between "correctness and Skeltonian licence.

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Surrey goes beyond Wyat in the enthusiasm of nature, in the worship of bud and bloom. In the depths of his amorous despair, the beauty of the tender green, and the careless happiness of the brute creation, arrest his eye, and detain him for certain moments from his own sorrow. His most frequently quoted sonnet is a picture of the general happiness of nature in spring, artfully prolonged to the last line, when his own misery bursts in, refusing any longer to be comforted or held at a distance with other interests. There is great freshness in his enjoyment of spring; he describes what he has seen and felt :

"When Summer took in hand the Winter to assail,

With force of might, and virtue great, his stormy blasts to quail;
And when he clothed fair the earth about with green,
And every tree new garmented that pleasure was to seen:
Mine heart gan new revive, and changed blood did stur
Me to withdraw my winter woe, that kept within the durre.

Abroad, quod my desire, assay to set thy foot,
Where thou shalt find the summer sweet, for sprung is every
And to thy health, if thou wert sick in any case,

Nothing more good than in the spring the air to feel a space.
There thou shalt hear and see all kinds of birds y-wrought,

root:

Well tune their voice with warble small, as Nature hath them taught.
Thus pricked me my lust the sluggish house to leave,

And for my health I thought it best, such counsel to receive.

So on a morrow forth, unwist of any wight,

I went to prove how well it would my heavy burden light.
And when I felt the air so pleasant round about,
Lord! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out.
There might I see how Ver had every blossom bent;
And eke the new betrothed birds y-coupled how they went.
And in their songs methought, they thanked Nature much,
That by her licence all that year to love their hap was such.'

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Nature, however, was not always a soothing balm to his restlessness her sweet dews fell unheeded on the tumult of his veins his hurrying thoughts would not obey the admonition of her stately movements. In the repose of midnight his complaint rose with unabated anguish :

"Alas! so all things now do hold their peace!
Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing:
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease;
The nightes chair the stars about doth bring:
Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less.
So am not I, whom love alas doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great increase
Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,

In joy and wo as in a doubtful ease.

For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring,

But by-and-by the cause of my disease

Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,

When that I think what grief it is again

To live and lack the thing should rid my pain."

What a contrast to the repose of Greek sculpture! how fine a subject for Mr Matthew Arnold's lesson of "Self-Dependence"!

It is exceedingly difficult to trace differences of character in the love - poems of Surrey and Wyat. We find in Surrey a greater richness of circumstance and epithet, a more glowing colour; but we cannot lay our finger upon any one mood in either poet, and say with confidence that we should be surprised to find it in the other. For one thing Surrey wrote comparatively few poems, so that we have no assurance of having boxed the compass of his moods; and for another thing, it was part of his energetic versatility to be able to throw himself into an imaginary situation upon any accidental hint, and compose a song or sonnet to correspond.

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