division of the fourteen lines into two quatrains, forming eight lines of opening, and two terzettes, forming six lines for the delivery of the thought. He observed that there should be only two rhymes running through the two quatrains, that the second quatrain should echo the rhyming of the first, and that the two rhymes have, with Petrarch, an arrangement that he preferred and seldom departed from (abba). Wyatt observed also that there should be three rhymes running through the two terzettes. Surrey not merely ended his sonnets with couplets, but was essentially irregular in the arrangement of their rhymes. Here, for instance, is one of Wyatt's sonnets: A RENOUNCING OF LOVE. Farewell Love! and all thy laws for ever; Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore, And thereon spend thy many brittle darts; For, hitherto though I have lost all my time, Me list no longer rotten boughs to clime. His fellow-poet, the Earl of Surrey, wrote these lines ON THE DEATH OF SIR THOMAS WYATT. Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest: A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame; Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, As on a stithe, where that some work of fame Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey were, in Henry VIII.'s reign, the first introducers of the Sonnet into English Literature. Wyatt, the elder man, was also a more exact imitator of the form of the sonnet as the practice of Petrarch had maintained and established it. The Earl of Surrey's imitations of the Petrarchan sonnet were defective as to their mechanism in several respects. Wyatt overlooked only one condition, namely, that the last two lines should not rhyme as a couplet; and for his use of a closing couplet he had authority in the practice of Dante's contemporary, Cino da Pistoia, and of other Italian masters. In Wyatt's sonnets there is always a couplet at the close, in Petrarch's Otherwise Wyatt observed accurately the never. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was about fourteen years younger than Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, and survived him but five years, was the elder son of Thomas, Earl of Surrey, by his second wife, daughter of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. Henry Howard became Earl of Surrey in 1526, at the age of about seven, when his father succeeded to the dukedom of Norfolk. Two years later the boy served as cupbearer to King Henry VIII., and from the time when he was fifteen he was in regular attendance upon the king's person. His father loved literature; his mother had been an especial friend to Skelton; and the Earl of Surrey soon acquired fame at court as a poet who could write skilfully in the Italian fashion, and vigorously too in his own way as a high-spirited, energetic, and somewhat headstrong young lord. His exercises in the writing of loveSonnets were inscribed to a little girl at court, the 1 Corpse (French "corps"), the body. In old English, not necessarily the dead body. She Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, whose family claimed affinity with the Tuscan line of the Giraldi of Florence. Gerald Fitzgerald and his five uncles had risen in rebellion; he had been made prisoner, and attainted as a traitor. He died in the Tower in 1534, leaving little Elizabeth (Surrey's "Geraldine"), aged six, an object of compassion to the court. was brought to England, and placed at Hunsdon with her second cousin, the Princess Mary. The Earl of Surrey was then seventeen years old, and had been contracted in marriage, a year or two before, to the Earl of Oxford's daughter, Lady Frances Vere. In the following year, 1535, when Surrey's age was eighteen, and Geraldine's was seven, Surrey married. In 1536 his first son, Thomas, was born; and in 1539 his second son, Henry. Geraldine also married early, and was Lady Antony Brown, though but nineteen years of age, in 1547, the year of Surrey's execution. It had always been required that sequences of sonnets showing a poet's skill in running up and down. the scale of the one chiefly-appointed theme, should be inscribed to ladies who were not in any close personal relation of love to the poet. Without that understanding, reputations would have been continually compromised. Ladies were, doubtless, as unwilling then as now to be courted aloud on the housetops, and the old Courts of Love had, in fact, kept strict guard over the line between publicity of rhyming and the privacies of personal affection. Dante's Beatrice first appears in his sonnets as a child of eight, and she died young, Simon dei Bardi's wife, to whom honour was added by the poet who associated her with his ideal verse. Laura was in her eighteenth year when she married Hugues de Sades, and she was the mother of eleven children when she died at the age of about forty, Petrarch still celebrating her in a form of verse by which no one could be offended, because in its own day it was seldom misunderstood. The world never saw a line of verse written by Dante to his own wife, or by Petrarch to the mother of his son John and his daughter Francesca. Following, therefore, what had become an established fashion, when Surrey proved his courtly skill in the writing of love-sonnets, he dedicated them, not to his wife-his words to her were for her ear alonebut to a child of the court, whom it was kindly to distinguish as the theme of his exercises in conventional love rhetoric. The following sonnet is that which proves Elizabeth Fitzgerald to have been the Earl of Surrey's Geraldine : : DESCRIPTION AND PRAISE OF HIS LOVE GERALDINK From Tuscane came my lady's worthy race; Fair Florence was sometime their ancient seat. The western isle whose pleasant shore doth face Wild Camber's cliffs, did give her lively heat. Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast: Her sire an earl, her dame of prince's blood. From tender years, in Britain doth she rest, With king's child; where she tasteth costly food. Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyne: Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight. Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine; And Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight. Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above; Happy is he that can obtain her love! The next piece will serve to illustrate Surrey's skill as an imitator of Petrarch. It is translated from Petrarch's first canzone, which is placed between his tenth and eleventh sonnets, and consists in the original, as here, of fourteen lines, although it is not a true sonnet in its structure. It is, nevertheless, as near an approach to a sonnet as anything else left us by Surrey : COMPLAINT THAT HIS LADY, AFTER SHE KNEW OF HIS LOVE, KEPT HER FACE ALWAY HIDDEN FROM HIM. I never saw my lady lay apart Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat, The which unwares did wound my woful breast; In summer, sun, in winter's breath, a frost; In 1542 Surrey served under his father, who led an English force across the border, and was at the burning of Kelsal. After his return he was imprisoned awhile in the Fleet for breaking citizens' windows. One of his two comrades in that freak was the only son of Wyatt the poet, Thomas Wyatt the younger, who was about three years younger than Surrey, and who was executed in 1554 for rebellion against the marriage of Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. Surrey playfully excused his offence of window-breaking in this SATIRE AGAINST THE CITIZENS OF LONDON. London! hast thou accuséd me Of breach of laws? the root of strife! That terror could it not repress. That secret sin hath secret spite; In secret silence of the night A figure of the Lord's behest, Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures shew. That as the fearful thunder's clap By sudden flame at hand we know; Of pebble stones the soundless rap, The dreadful plague might make thee see Of God's wrath that doth thee enwrap. That Pride might know, from conscience free, How lofty works may her defend; And Wrath taste of each cruel thought And greedy Lucre live in dread, And gluttons' hearts for sorrow bleed, In loathsome vice each drunken wight Wrested to wrath my fervent zeal O shameless! is dread then gone? The shop of craft! the den of ire! The Lord shall hear their just desire! Thy proud towers, and turrets high Immortal praise with one accord. In October, 1543, the Earl of Surrey was a volunteer with the army in France before Landrécy. In the following July, 1544, he went to the wars again, and, as marshal of the English camp, he conducted the retreat from Montreuil. In August, 1545, he crossed the Channel again in command of an expedition for defence of Boulogne. He was recalled from Boulogne in April, 1546; found enemies at court; and in December, 1546, was arrested and sent to the Tower. A royal quartering in his arms was made the ground of an accusation of treason, and in the last days of Henry VIII., on the 21st of January, 1547, only a week before the king's death, the Earl of Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill. His father, who had also been arrested, escaped a similar end because his death-warrant was not yet signed when King Henry died. A much-loved follower of Surrey's was Thomas Clere, youngest son of Sir Robert Clere, of Ormesby, in Norfolk, and Alice, daughter of Sir William Boleyn. Clere, whose family traced its origin back to the counts of Cleremont, in Normandy, before the Conquest, was present at the coronation of his cousin, Anne Boleyn; loved a daughter of Sir John Shelton, in Norfolk; but died, aged twenty-eight, of a hurt received while he was protecting his wounded master from danger at one of the gates of Montreuil. was buried in a chapel at Lambeth, with these lines by the Earl of Surrey placed over his tomb : EPITAPH ON CLERE. Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead; Clere, of the Count of Clerémont, thou hight; Within the womb of Ormond's race thou bred, And saw'st thy cousin crownéd in thy sight. Shelton for love, Surrey for lord thou chase;1 He (Aye, me! whilst life did last that league was tender!) Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsal blaze, Landrécy burnt, and battered Boulogne render. At Montreuil gates, hopeless of all recure,? Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will; Which cause did thee this pining death procure, Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfil. Ah! Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost, Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost. Surrey paraphrased some of the Psalms, and the first five chapters of Ecclesiastes. He also translated the second and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid into blank verse, a measure then being tried in Italy, and by him first introduced into our literature. These opening lines of the second book were the first lines of blank verse written in English: : They whisted all, with fixéd face attent, And lo! moist night now from the welkin falls; HOW NO AGE IS CONTENT WITH HIS OWN ESTATE, AND HOW THE AGE OF CHILDREN IS THE HAPPIEST IF THEY HAD SKILL TO UNDERSTAND IT. Laid in my quiet bed, in study as I were, I saw within my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear. A CARELESS MAN SCORNING AND DESCRIBING THE SUBTLE USAGE OF WOMEN TOWARD THEIR LOVERS. Wrapt in my careless cloak, as I walk to and fro, I see how Love can shew what force there reigneth in his bow: |