for its relations to other things than for its own merit. Yet it occupies a higher place than the prose, in our literary history. It exhibits, in temper, in manner, and in the nature of the topics selected, a very decisive contrast to the poetry of the times that were past it bears in several points a close resemblance, and it furnished many materials and many forms, to the poetry of the energetic age that was soon to open.

The poetical names with which we require to form an acquaintance are very few: and the character of the works might be understood most easily if we were to arrange them in three groups, which would exhibit three dissimilar stages in the progress of taste and literary cultivation. In the first of these the chief was Skelton: the second was headed by Surrey; and the third, which shows deviation, perhaps, rather than progress, may be represented by Sackville. This classification should be remembered; though the order of the minor poets would make it inapplicable to a full history of the time.

. The irregular pomp of chivalrous and allegorical pageantry, which accompanied us in our survey of the middle ages, had in the meantime vanished. Its last appearance was in the poem of Hawes, which, as already noticed, might have been referred, without impropriety, to the beginning of this period. It was succeeded, at first, by nothing higher than a Satirical kind of Poetry, in which features of actual life were depicted and anatomized, in a spirit caught from the prevalent restlessness and discontent. One of its effusions was Alexander Barclay's "Ship of Fools," translated from a continental work, but containing many additions illustrating the weaknesses and vices of English life and manners. It is a general moral satire, having very little that is either vigorous or amusing.

The poems, if they deserve to be so called, of the eccentric John Skelton, are not only more interesting for their d. 1529. closeness of application to historical incidents and persons, but are singularly though coarsely energetic, and do not altogether want glimmerings of poetical fancy. After having been. the tutor of Henry the Eighth, he continued to write during the greater part of his pupil's reign, satirizing ecclesiastical and social abuses, attacking great men in the full flush of their power, and taking greater liberties with none than with the formidable Wolsey. The point of his sarcasms is not infrequently lost, through obscure and aimless digressions and mystifications, which may plausibly be attributed to an occasional fit of caution. But the personalities are still oftener so undisguised, and the malicious bitterness is so provoking, that the impunity enjoyed

by the libeller is a matter of surprise, although we make the fullest allowance for the caprice and inconsistency which at all times marked the administration of the king. There are not, in Skelton's works, very many verses that rise into the region of poetry: but his acuteness of observation, his keenness of humour, and his inexhaustible fertility of familiarly fanciful illustration, impart to his pieces an exceedingly curious and amusing grotesqueness. His command of words, too, is quite extraordinary. It not only gave good augury of the future development of the language, but showed that, by him at least, rapid progress had already been made. Although his task was much aided by his unscrupulous coinage of new and ridiculous terms, and by his frequent indentation of Latin words and lines into his English, yet the volubility with which he vents his acrid humour is truly surprising; and it is made the more so through the difficulties imposed on him by the kind of versification, which, seemingly invented by himself, he used oftener than any other. It consists of exceedingly short lines, many of which often rhyme together in close succession, and have double or triple endings.*

4. A new era in the history of our poetry was unquestionably b. ab. 1516. opened by the works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. In respect of poetical vigour and originality,

d. 1547.

* JOHN SKELTON.

From "Colin Clout;" in which the abuses said to prevail in the Church are set forth in long complaints, put into the mouths of the people, and interspersed with very short and doubtful expressions of discontent by the poet.

this accomplished and ill-fated person was inferior to many poets who have long been forgotten: but his foreign studies, and his refinement of taste and feeling, concurred in enabling him to turn our poetical literature into a track which had not yet been trodden.

The works through which Surrey's influence was exerted were of two kinds: a collection of Sonnets and other poems of a Lyrical and Amatory cast; and a Translation of the Second and Fourth Books of the Æneid. All of them have this in common; that they are imitations of Italian models, which, in our country, had not yet perhaps been by any one studied exactly, and had certainly never yet been imitated. His were the first Sonnets in our language; so that he gave us a new form of poetical composition, and a form which, used with zealous frequency by all the greatest poets of the Elizabethan age, has not lost its hold from that time to this. Nor was there less of novelty in the introduction of that refined and sentimental turn of thought, which breathes through all his lyrics, and which was prompted by Petrarch and his other Italian masters. The Italian studies of our poets of the fourteenth century, lay, as we have learned, in other quarters: the Petrarchan subtilties and conceits, and the Petrarchan tenderness and reflectiveness, were alike ungenial in their rougher and more manly temperament. Surrey was thus our usher into a poetical school, in which, for much good and not a little harm, succeeding poets became both pupils and teachers: and, it should also be remembered, his studies in the poetry of Italy, as it existed before his own day, prepared the way for introducing to the notice of his successors the great Italian works which were produced in his century. Surrey's familiarity with Petrarch's lyrics was a step towards Spenser's acquaintance with the chivalrous epic of Tasso.

His Æneid conferred on us an obligation yet weightier. It was not the first translation of a classical poem into English verse; unless indeed we should think ourselves compelled to reruse the name of English to the language used in Gawain Douglas's version, from which, indeed, Surrey borrowed not a little. But it was the first specimen of English Blank Verse: the unwonted metre was handled, not very skilfully, indeed, yet with a success which instantly recommended it for adoption: and thus we have to thank Surrey for a form of versification, in which the noblest poetry of our tongue has since been couched, and but for which our drama and our epic would alike have been incomparably meaner and feebler and less animated. This was another of

his importations from Italy, in which a similar metre appeared early in the century.*

One is strongly tempted to pass over, in silence, on account of its real frivolousness, another claim which has been made on behalf of the noble poet. He is asserted to have been the writer who substituted, in our poetry, the counting of metres by syllables for the counting of them by accents. The true state of the case seems to be simply this. The accentual reckoning of measure was undoubtedly the oldest practice; and, in a strongly ac

*LORD SURREY.

I. A SONNET ON EARLY SUMMER.

The sweet season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come; for every spray now springs.
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter-coat he flings;
The fishes fleet with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she flings:
The swift swallow pursuëth the flies small:
The busy bee her honey now she mings:1

Winter is worn that was the flower's bale.
And thus, I see, among these pleasant things
Each care decays; and yet my sorrow springs.

II. FROM THE TRANSLATION OF THE ÆNEID, BOOK SECOND.
The Ghost of Creusa vanishing from Eneas.
Thus having said, she left me, all in tears
And minding much to speak; but she was gone,
And subtly fled into the weightless air.

Thrice raught I with mine arms to accol3 her neck;
Thrice did my hands' vain hold the image escape,
Like nimble winds and like the flying dream.

So, night spent out, return I to my feres ;*
And there, wond'ring, I find together swarmed

A new number of mates: mothers and men,

A rout exiled, a wretched multitude,

From each where flock together, prests to pass,
With heart and goods, to whatsoever land
By sliding seas we listed them to lead.

And now rose Lucifer above the ridge

Of lusty Ide, and brought the dawning light.
The Greeks held the entries of the gates beset.
Of help there was no hope. Then gave I place,
Took up my sire, and hasted to the hill.

1 Mingles.

2 Reached.

3 Embrace. 4 Companions.Ready.

cented tongue like ours, it was the only one at all likely to be used in the ruder stages of literature. But the syllabic reckoning naturally and inevitably began to be taken more and more into account, as something like criticism arose: and the general substitution of the latter for the former took place the more readily, because of the tendency of our words to fall into iambics, which made the two reckonings to coincide not infrequently even in older times, and to coincide oftener and oftener as pronunciation became more fixed. Although the accentual counting is the safer and more convenient of the two for our reading of all our mediæval poetry, the other is applicable in a great number of instances, as early as Chaucer himself: it prevailed more and more widely afterwards: and it appears to be almost universally applicable to our later poetry of the fifteenth century, in both kingdoms of the island. That Surrey, guided by his foreign examples, followed the modern fashion more strictly than any before him, (though by no means always,) is probably true and it cannot well be doubted that, in this as in other respects, his example had much effect in making the adoption of it universal. Just as certain is it, that the old tendency towards accentual scanning survived his time. It shows itself very strongly in the versification of the dramatists in the Elizabethan age, and is used by some of them with much freedom and excellent effect and further, its congeniality to the structure of our language is shown by the rich and varied melody which, through its re-introduction, has been attained by several poets of our own time.

5. Along with Surrey is commonly named the elder Sir Thomas Wyatt; a conjunction made proper not only by the friendship of the two, but by a general likeness in taste, sentiment, and poetical forms. But Wyatt, wanting his friend's merit as the originator of valuable changes, does not call for very particular notice by his greater vigour of style and keenness of observation. His poetry is more diversified in kind than that of his friend: he indulged freely in epigram and satire; and he attempted, much more frequently, versified translation from the Scriptures.

His and Surrey's versions of some of the Psalms are the most polished among many attempts of the sort made in their time, none of them with much success. Not good, but not the worst of these, and better than the feeble modern rhymes by which it has been superseded, was the complete Translation of the Psalms which bears the names of Sternhold and Hopkins. More than a hundred of the psalms were from the pen of these two; but there