Chaucer and the Provençals.

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and third. I may say, in passing, that this metre, which we call the heroic, was first introduced into our language by Chaucer—at least I believe there is no instance of its use by any English poet before his time.”

"I say, Professor," I exclaimed, "does it happen to occur to you that you have taken a goodly number of words to tell me that the English contemporaries of Dante and Petrarch wrote no sonnets? Why, if we go on at this rate, it will be sunset before I am enlightened as to the time when the Italian exotic was introduced on English soil. Pray proceed, then, having a lively sense the while of honest Sir Hugh's admonition to Falstaff, 'pauca verba, Sir John.'

"Truly, lad," resumed the Professor, with a benignant smile, "the child is father of the man! I had forgotten that from a school-boy you were ever restive under 'preaching,' and I have been less considerate of your infirmity than I ought. Henceforward, I promise you, the pauca verba of Shakespeare's delightfully gossiping old pedant shall be my motto. To proceed, then, as you bid me: After the lapse of more than a century after the death of Chaucer-a century that was remarkable for its dearth of poets and poetry in England—it was reserved to two far inferior but genuine poets to graft the 'difficult novelty,' as George Ellis aptly styled the sonnet, upon the stem of our English literature. These were Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (A.D. 1516–1547), and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt (A.D. 1503–1542), two of the noblest ornaments of the reign of Henry the Eighth; but to which of them we are most indebted for the introduction of the new stanza it is difficult to determine, as their literary productions were first published conjointly ten years after the execution of Surrey and fifteen years after the death of Wyatt, and then without giving any record

of the dates when they were severally written. Wyatt was the older, graver, and more thoughtful man—the abler statesman, and the possessor of a more robust imagination; but Surrey had a more refined taste, a more graceful and more versatile fancy, and a greater facility as well as felicity of poetical expression than his friend. It has been commonly assumed, but on insufficient grounds, that he influenced Wyatt in his literary compositions more than he was influenced by himthe impression having been based on the presumed priority of Surrey's poetical productions. This, however, is a pure fiction; since it is certain that as Wyatt was nearly fourteen years older than Surrey, so a great number of his poems, assuredly the most of his love poems, were written while Surrey was a lad of ten or twelve. Many of Wyatt's sonnets are admitted to have been addressed to Anne Boleyn before her connection with Henry the Eighth, and must have been written when the poet was about twenty-three. In these poems, then, it is clear that Wyatt could not have been influenced by the example of Surrey, who was a boy of ten or eleven. Moreover, it is known that Surrey had been an ardent admirer of Wyatt from his early boyhood, long before there could have been any parity. of companionship between them, and when Wyatt's graces and accomplishments of mind and person were the theme of universal panegyric among his countrymen. It is therefore more reasonable to conclude that Surrey was stimulated by the example of Wyatt than the converse. Undoubtedly, Surrey's genius was the most brilliant; and his poetry is freer from conceits and affectations, and is less abounding in commonplace alliterations and metaphysical complexities than Wyatt's, while it is also in a loftier strain. To him certainly belongs the merit of having been the author of the first composition in

blank verse-it was in the form of a translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's 'Eneid '—extant in the English language. The friends were both men of elegant and varied accomplishments, unusually familiar with the Italian tongue, and they exerted a powerful and wholesome influence in refining and improving the English of their day. A comparison of their sonnets reveals that Surrey's are more graceful in expression than Wyatt's, and fuller of poetic feeling. I have now particularly in my mind two of Surrey's which are very charming. One of them, which evinces an ardent love of nature and a close observation of natural objects, is a description of spring, wherein, in the language of its author, 'Eche thing renewes save onely the Lover,' and is as follows:

"The soote* season, that bud and blome forth brings,
With grene hath clad the hill, and eke the vale:
The nightingale with fethers new she sings:
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale :
Somer is come, for every spray now springs:
The hart hath hong his old hed on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coate he flings:
The fishes flete with new repairéd scale:
The adder all her slough away she flings;
The swift swalow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her hony now she mings;‡
Winter is worne, that was the flowers bale.

And thus I se among these pleasant things
Eche care decayes; and yet my sorow springs.'

"The other sonnet of Surrey's he entitles 'A Complaint. by Night of the Lover not Beloved.' Listen to his plaintive lute:

* Sweet.

+ Float, or swim.

+ Mingles.

'Alas, so all things now doe holde their peace,
Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing,

The beastes, the ayer, the birds their song doe cease,
The nightes chare* the starres about doth bring;
Calme is the sea, the waves worke lesse and lesse:
So am not I, whom love alas doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great encrease
Of my desires, whereat I wepe and sing,

In joy and wo, as in a doubtful case:

For my swete thoughts sometime do pleasure bring;
But by and by the cause of my disease

Geves me a pang, that inwardly doth sting,

When that I thinke what grief it is againe,

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

"Thus much for Surrey. The memory of Surrey's friend, Wyatt, the elder, has been pleasantly revived recently by Mr. Tennyson's 'Queen Mary,' in which the poet's son is made to figure tragically but heroically. In this drama, just as the younger Wyatt is preparing to leave the 'gray towers' of Allington Castle to plunge into the plot for Mary's dethronement, the laureate makes him pause for a moment, 'before the mine be fired,' and say, "It were a pious work

To string my father's sonnets, left about

Like loosely-scattered jewels, in fair order,
And head them with a lamer rhyme of mine,

To grace his memory.'

And when the casket with his father's sonnets had been handed him by his and his father's faithful old servitor, and he is left in momentary solitude, he soliloquizes thus tenderly of his parent:

* Chair, or chariot.

Tennyson's Wyatt the Younger.

"Courtier of many courts, he loved the more

His own gray towers, plain life and letter'd peace,
To read and rhyme in solitary fields,

The lark above, the nightingale below,

And answer them in song. The Sire begets

Not half his likeness in the Son. I fail

Where he was fullest.'

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Again, still later on, when his blunt adherent, Antony Knyvett, bursts in to announce that the insurrection has broken out, and ten thousand men are waiting on Pennenden Heath and roaring for him to lead them, he is found still absorbed in his pious duty of arranging his father's sonnets, and heading them with a 'lamer rhyme' of his own; whereupon the outspoken retainer, waxing wroth, denounces the sonnet as nothing better or less ephemeral than a 'flying ant,' and cries out with matterof-fact frankness, 'Look you, Master Wyatt, tear up that woman's work there;' to which Wyatt replies, prophetically:

"No; not these

Dumb children of my father, that will speak

When I and you and all rebellious lie

Dead bodies without voice. Song flies, you know,

For ages.'

"The finest characterization of the elder Wyatt with which I am familiar is that by Surrey, who thus describes his friend in one of the manliest and most unaffected elegies in our liter

ature:

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.