From “Introduction to the Literature of Europe,” Part I., Chap. viii.

“IN the latter end of King Henry the Eighth’s reign,” says Puttenham in his “Art of Poesie,” “sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who having travailed into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style. In the same time or not long after was the Lord Nicolas Vaux, a man of much facility in vulgar makings.” The poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who died in 1544, and of the Earl of Surrey, executed in 1547, were first published in 1557, with a few by other hands, in a scarce little book called “Tottel’s Miscellanies.” They were, however, in all probability, known before; and it seems necessary to mention them in this period, as they mark an important epoch in English literature.

  Wyatt and Surrey, for we may best name them in the order of time, rather than of civil or poetical rank, have had recently the good fortune to be recommended by an editor of extensive acquaintance with literature, and of still superior taste. It will be a gratification to read the following comparison of the two poets, which I extract the more willingly that it is found in a publication somewhat bulky and expensive for the mass of readers:—

	“They were men whose minds may be said to have been cast in the same mold, for they differ only in those minuter shades of character which always must exist in human nature,—shades of difference so infinitely varied, that there never were and never will be two persons in all respects alike. In their love of virtue and their instinctive hatred and contempt of vice, in their freedom from personal jealousy, in their thirst after knowledge and intellectual improvement, in nice observation of nature, promptitude to action, intrepidity and fondness for romantic enterprise, in magnificence and liberality, in generous support of others and high-spirited neglect of themselves, in constancy in friendship, and tender susceptibility of affections of a still warmer nature, and in everything connected with sentiment and principle, they were one and the same; but when those qualities branch out into particulars, they will be found in some respects to differ.
	“Wyatt had a deeper and more accurate penetration into the characters of men than Surrey had; hence arises the difference in their satires. Surrey, in his satire against the citizens of London, deals only in reproach; Wyatt, in his, abounds with irony, and those nice touches of ridicule which make us ashamed of our faults, and therefore often silently effect amendment. Surrey’s observation of nature was minute; but he directed it towards the words of nature in general, and the movements of the passions, rather than to the foibles and characters of men; hence it is that he excels in the description of rural objects, and is always tender and pathetic. In Wyatt’s “Complaint” we hear a strain of manly grief which commands attention, and we listen to it with respect, for the sake of him that suffers. Surrey’s distress is painted in such natural terms that we make it our own, and recognize in his sorrows emotions which we are conscious of having felt ourselves.
	“In point of taste and perception of propriety in composition, Surrey is more accurate and just than Wyatt; he therefore seldom either offends with conceits or wearies with repetition, and when he imitates other poets he is original as well as pleasing. In his numerous translations from Petrarch he is seldom inferior to his master; and he seldom improves upon him. Wyatt is almost always below the Italian, and frequently degrades a good thought by expressing it so that it is hardly recognizable. Had Wyatt attempted a translation of Virgil, as Surrey did, he would have exposed himself to unavoidable failure.”

    To remarks so delicate in taste and so founded in knowledge, I should not venture to add much of my own. Something, however, may generally be admitted to modify the ardent panegyrics of an editor. Those who, after reading this brilliant passage, should turn for the first time to the poems either of Wyatt or of Surrey, might think the praise too unbounded, and, in some respects perhaps, not appropriate. It seems to be now ascertained, after sweeping away a host of foolish legends and traditionary prejudices, that the Geraldine of Surrey, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, was a child of thirteen, for whom his passion, if such it is to be called, began several years after his own marriage. But in fact there is more of the conventional tone of amorous song, than of real emotion, in Surrey’s poetry. The

“Easy sighs, such as men draw in love,”

are not like the deep sorrows of Petrarch, or the fiery transports of the Castilians.

  The taste of this accomplished man is more striking than his poetical genius. He did much for his own country and his native language. The versification of Surrey differs very considerably from that of his predecessors. He introduced, as Dr. Nott says, a sort of involution into his style, which gives an air of dignity and remoteness from common life. It was, in fact, borrowed from the license of Italian poetry, which our own idiom has rejected. He avoids pedantic words, forcibly obtruded from the Latin, of which our earlier poets, both English and Scotch, had been ridiculously fond. The absurd epithets of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Douglas are applied equally to the most different things, so as to show that they annexed no meaning to them. Surrey rarely lays an unnatural stress on final syllables, merely as such, which they would not receive in ordinary pronunciation,—another usual trick of the school of Chaucer. His words are well chosen and well arranged.

  Surrey is the first who introduced blank verse into our English poetry. It has been doubted whether it had been previously employed in Italian, save in tragedy; for the poems of Alamanni and Rucellai were not published before many of our noble poet’s compositions had been written. Dr. Nott, however, admits that Boscan and other Spanish poets had used it. The translation by Surrey of the second book of the “Æneid,” in blank verse, is among the chief of his productions. No one had, before his time, known how to translate or imitate with appropriate expression. But the structure of his verse is not very harmonious, and the sense is rarely carried beyond the line.

  If we could rely on a theory, advanced and ably supported by his editor, Surrey deserves the still more conspicuous praise of having brought about a great revolution in our poetical numbers. It had been supposed to be proved by Tyrwhitt that Chaucer’s lines are to be read metrically, in ten or eleven syllables, like the Italian, and, as I apprehend, the French of his time. For this purpose it is necessary to presume that many terminations, now mute, were syllabically pronounced; and where verses prove refractory after all our endeavors, Tyrwhitt has no scruple in declaring them corrupt. It may be added that Gray, before the appearance of Tyrwhitt’s essay on the versification of Chaucer, had adopted without hesitation the same hypothesis. But, according to Dr. Nott, the verses of Chaucer, and of all his successors down to Surrey, are merely rhythmical, to be read by cadence, and admitting of considerable variety in the number of syllables, though ten may be the more frequent. In the manuscripts of Chaucer the line is always broken by a cæsura in the middle, which is pointed out by a virgule; and this is preserved in the early editions down to that of 1532. They come near, therefore, to the short Saxon line, differing chiefly by the alternate rhyme, which converts two verses into one. He maintains that a great many lines of Chaucer cannot be read metrically, though harmonious as verses of cadence. This rhythmical measure he proceeds to show in Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, and even Wyatt; and thus concludes that it was first abandoned by Surrey, in whom it very rarely occurs.

  This hypothesis, it should be observed, derives some additional plausibility from a passage in Gascoyne’s “Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English,” printed in 1575:—

“Whosoever do peruse and well consider his [Chaucer’s] works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one self-same number of syllables, yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse, and that which hath most syllables in it, will fall (to the ear) correspondent unto that which hath fewest syllables; and likewise that which hath fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such natural sound as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents.”

  A theory so ingeniously maintained, and with so much induction of examples, has naturally gained a good deal of credit. I cannot, however, by any means concur in the extension given to it. Pages may be read in Chaucer, and still more in Dunbar, where every line is regularly and harmoniously decasyllabic; and though the cæsura may perhaps fall rather more uniformly than it does in modern verse, it would be very easy to find exceptions, which could not acquire a rhythmical cadence by any artifice of the reader. The deviations from the normal type, or decasyllable line, were they more numerous than, after allowance for the license of pronunciation, as well as the probable corruption of the text, they appear to be, would not, I conceive, justify us in concluding that it was disregarded. For these aberrant lines are much more common in the dramatic blank verse of the seventeenth century. They are, doubtless, vestiges of the old rhythmical forms; and we may readily allow that English versification had not, in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries, the numerical regularity of classical or Italian metre. In the ancient ballads, Scotch and English, the substitution of the anapest for the iambic foot is of perpetual recurrence, and gives them a remarkable elasticity and animation; but we never fail to recognize a uniformity of measure, which the use of nearly equipollent feet cannot, on the strictest metrical principles, be thought to impair.

  If we compare the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey with that of Barclay or Skelton, about thirty or forty years before, the difference must appear wonderful. But we should not, with Dr. Nott, attribute this wholly to superiority of genius. It is to be remembered that the later poets wrote in a court, and in one which, besides the aristocratic manners of chivalry, had not only imbibed a great deal of refinement from France and Italy, but a considerable tinge of ancient literature. Their predecessors were less educated men, and they addressed a more vulgar class of readers. Nor was this polish of language peculiar to Surrey and his friend. In the short poems of Lord Vaux, and of others about the same time, even in those of Nicolas Grimoald, a lecturer at Oxford, who was no courtier, but had acquired a classical taste, we find a rejection of obsolete and trivial phrases, and the beginnings of what we now call the style of our older poetry.