HENRY VII CONTINUED. HENRY VIII wrote poetry as well as prose. He played on the flute and the spinett. He set to music ballads for his court and masses for his chapel, and he left behind him a motett, an anthem, and many scaffolds. He was certainly a troubadour of most imaginative genius. This man, who employed a wooden image of the Virgin as part of the materials for the pile at which the confessor of Catharine of Arragon was burnt-who summoned before his tribunal the dead body of St. Thomas of Canterbury, tried it and condemned it to death, in spite of the legal maxim, non bis in idem; who caused faggots to be bound on the backs of five Dutch Anabaptists, and regaled his eyes with the spectacle of five moving auto-da-fés.; he had a fine subject for a romantic sonnet when, from the summit of a solitary hill in Richmond Park, he saw the signal which was transmitted from the Tower of London, announcing the execution of Anne Boleyn. What delicious satisfaction he must have enjoyed at that moment! The axe had severed the delicate neck, and stained with blood the beautiful hair, on which the poet king had lavished his fatal caresses. SURREY-SIR THOMAS MORE. In the reign of Henry VIII we find Surrey and Thomas More. The Earl of Surrey released English poetry from the forms of the middle ages, and conferred on it the impress of the Italian style by composing sonnets to Geraldine in the manner of Petrarch. It is supposed by some that Geraldine was Elizabeth Fitzgerald; but others allege that she was the daughter of Lord Kildare. Be that as it may, the beautiful and beloved lady once was, and is now no more. Surrey, being in Florence, addressed a challenge to every christian, Jew, Moor, Turk, and cannibal, declaring that he, Surrey, would maintain against one or all the incomparable beauty of Geraldine. Petrarch sighed for Laura, but did not fight for her. The English of those days displayed their chivalry and their passions among those ruins to which they now carry only their fashions and their ennui. On his return to England, Surrey was impri soned in Windsor Castle by the orthodox Henry VIII, for having eaten flesh during Lent. "Here noble Surrey felt the sacred rage." РОРЕ. The last victim of the first protestant King of Great Britain was the noble lover of Geraldine. The reforming prince proved his attachment to literature by dooming to the block Sir Thomas More, and the poet with whose writings the era of modern English poetry commences. In the Tower of London are preserved the axes which struck off many illustrious heads. The bit of iron survives moulds which comprised power and genius. Surrey, in his translation of some fragments of the Æneid, introduced the blank verse which Milton and Thompson adopted, and which Lord Byron rejected. Sir Thomas More, like his good king, was a poet and a prose writer. Most of his works are written in Latin. The head of the chancellor was exposed, for the space of a fortnight, on London Bridge. Henry VIII, in his clemency, commuted the punishment of hanging, to which the author of "Utopia" was condemned, to that of decapitation. On being informed of this, the learned magistrate replied: "Heaven preserve my friends from the like favour!" |