For two reasons the brilliant but unhappy Surrey holds a foremost place in the annals of our English literature. He was, so far as we know, the earliest writer of English blank verse, and he gave to English poetry a refinement and polish for which we search in vain among his predecessors.

His father was the third Duke of Norfolk; and his mother, Elizabeth, was a daughter of the great house of Buckingham. But Surrey had more from Heaven than noble birth could give, for the sacred fire of poetry burned in his breast. Of his boyhood we know nothing certain. Nursed in the lap of luxury, and the darling of a splendid Court, he yet won a soldier's laurels both in Scotland and in France. But his fame was not to be carved out only with a sword. Travelling into Italy, he "tasted the sweet and stately measures and stile of the Italian poesie," and returned home to re-cast in the elegant mould of his accomplished mind the metres of his native land.

At home, however, he became involved in many troubles. Some of these resulted from the escapades of his own youthful folly. He was once imprisoned for rioting in the streets at night and breaking windows with a cross-bow. But other and graver evils came. In the latter days of the reign, when "Bluff King Hal" had become "Bloated King Hal," and all the courtly circle saw that the huge heap of wickedness was sinking into the grave, there arose a keen contest between the noble houses of Howard

EXECUTION OF SURREY.

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and Seymour. The element of religious strife added to the bitterness of the feeling which grew up between these two rival families; for the Howards were Roman Catholics, and the Earl of Hertford, the head of the Seymours, was a secret friend of the Reformation. The grand aim of Hertford was to secure the protectorship of his young nephew Prince Edward when the old king was dead. Surrey and his father Norfolk, standing in the way, must perish. The thing was easy to do; the name of Howard was poison to the king, who had already soiled their proud escutcheon with an ugly smear of blood, drawn, four years earlier, from the fair neck of his fifth wife. Arrested for treason, the father and the son, each ignorant of the other's capture, were hurried by different ways to the Tower. Surrey was tried at Guildhall on a flimsy charge of treason, supported chiefly by the fact that he had quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor on his shield with those of his own family. This was tortured into a proof that he aimed at the throne. He had long worn these arms, he said, even in the king's own sight; and the heralds had allowed him to do so in virtue of his royal descent. In spite of these simple truths, and the noble eloquence of his defence, the poet was doomed to die; and on the 19th of January 1547 his bright hair, all dabbled in blood, swept the dust of the scaffold. Eight days later, the blood-stained Henry died, just in time to save from the block the head of Norfolk, whose execution had been arranged for the following morning,

A.D.

Surrey's literary merits have been already noticed. Dr. Nott, who edited Surrey's works, claims for the poet the honour of having revolutionized English poetry, by substituting lines of fixed length, where the accents fall evenly, for the rhythmical lines of earlier poets, in which the number of syllables is irregular, and the equality of the lines requires to be kept up by certain pauses or cadences of the voice. But recent writers have shown that this theory cannot be maintained. In the words of Dr. Craik, "The true merit of Surrey is, that he restored to our poetry a correctness, polish, and general spirit of refinement, such as it had not known

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THE EARLIEST ENGLISH BLANK-VERSE.

since Chaucer's time; and of which, therefore, in the language as now spoken, there was no previous example whatever." Like Chaucer, he caught his inspiration from the great bards of Italy, and sat especially at the feet of Petrarch. In his purification of English verse, he did good service by casting out those clumsy Latin words, with which the lines of even Dunbar are heavily clogged.

The poems of Petrarch ring the changes in exquisite music on his love for Laura. So the love-verses of Surrey are filled with the praises of the fair Geraldine, whom Horace Walpole has tried to identify with Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a daughter of the Earl of Kildare. If this be so, Geraldine was only a girl of thirteen when the poet, already married to Frances Vere for six years, sang of her beauty and her virtue: It is no unlikely thing that Surrey, an instinctive lover of the beautiful, was smitten with a deep admiration of the fresh, young, girlish face of one

"Standing with reluctant feet,

Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet."

Such a feeling could exist—it often has existed-in the poet's breast, free from all mingling of sin, and casting no shadow of reproach upon a husband's loyalty.

Surrey's chief work was the translation into English blankverse of the Second and Fourth books of Virgil's " Eneid." Some think that he borrowed this verse from Italy; Dr. Nott supposes that he got the hint from Gavin Douglas, the Scottish translator of Virgil. Wherever the gem was found, Surrey has given it to English literature; a rough gem, indeed, at first, and shining with a dim, uncertain gleam, but soon, beneath Shakspere's magic hand, leaping forth to the sight of men, a diamond of the first water, flashing with a thousand coloured lights.

Surrey is said to have written also the first English Sonnets.*

* The Sonnet is borrowed from the Italian. It is a poem of fourteen lines, two of its four stanzas having four lines each, and the others three lines. The rhymes are arranged according to a particular rule

ROBERT HENRYSON was chief schoolmaster at Dunfermline about the end of the fifteenth century. His longest poem is the Testament of Fair Creseide, in which Chaucer's tale of "Troilus and Creseide" is continued. The fine ballad of Robin and Makyne, which may be found in Percy's "Reliques," is ascribed to this accomplished man. The Moral Fables of Esop, and The Garment of Gude Ladyes, are his chief remaining works. He is said to have died some time before 1508.

WILLIAM DUNBAR, placed by Sir Walter Scott at the head of Scottish poets, and perhaps, therefore, deserving more prominence than he receives here, is thought to have been a native of East Lothian, and to have been closely allied to the noble house of March. This Chaucer of the North graduated at St. Andrews as M.A. in 1479. Then, assuming the grey robe of the Franciscans, he travelled for some years in Britain and France, preaching and begging, according to the custom of the friars; and he afterwards visited the English and some of the Continental courts, as an attaché to certain Scottish embassies. The many-coloured life he thus spent is clearly reflected in his works, which show remarkable knowledge of human nature and society. Pensions, rising