Born about 1517: beheaded on Tower Hill, London, Jan. 21, 1547…. He received an unusually good education, and from 1530–32 lived at Windsor with the young Duke of Richmond, the natural son of Henry VIII., accompanying the king to France in 1532. He remained at the French court for about a year. In 1541 he was installed Knight of the Garter, and in 1543 joined the English forces at Landrecies with special recommendations from Henry VIII. to Charles V., and a little later was appointed cupbearer to the king. He was present at the surrender of Boulogne, of which he was made governor in 1545, but was recalled to England the next year. Henry VIII. was ill, and, when his death was near, Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk, who was premier duke, was suspected of aiming at the throne. A month before the king’s death both were arrested, and the Duke of Norfolk, as peer of the realm, was tried by his peers. The Earl of Surrey, however, who had only a courtesy title, was tried by a jury picked for the occasion, who found that he “falsely, maliciously, and treacherously set up and bore the arms of Edward the Confessor, then used by the Prince of Wales, mixed up and joined with his own proper arms.” He had borne these arms without question in the presence of the king, as the Howards before him had done since their grant by Richard II. He was tried for high treason and beheaded. His poems were first printed as “Songs and Sonetes” in “Tottel’s Miscellany” in 1557, with those of Sir Thomas Wyatt. He was the first English writer of blank verse, translating the second and fourth books of the Æneid into this form, and with Wyatt he introduced the sonnet into English literature.

Personal

	The gentle Surrey loved his lyre—
	Who has not heard of Surrey’s fame?
	His was the hero’s soul of fire,
	And his the bard’s immortal name.

	Thou, all-accomplished Surrey …
	The flower of Knighthood, nipt as soon as blown!
	Melting all hearts but Geraldine’s alone!

  As for the fair-haired, blue-eyed Geraldine, the mistress of his fancy and affections, and the subject of his verse, her identity long lay entombed, as it were, in a poetical name; but Surrey had loved her, had maintained her beauty at the point of his lance—had made her “famous by his pen, and glorious by his sword.” This was more than enough to excite the interest and the inquiries of posterity, and lo! antiquaries and commentators fell to work, archives were searched, genealogies were traced, and at length the substance of this beautiful poetical shadow was detected: she was proved to have been the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, afterwards the wife of a certain Earl of Lincoln, of whom little is known—but that he married the woman Surrey had loved.

  To his father’s hereditary sentiments Lord Surrey added a more than heriditary scorn of the “new men” whom the change of times was bringing like the scum to the surface of the state, and an ambition which no portion of his father’s prudence taught him to restrain. With brilliant genius, with reckless courage, with a pride which would brook no superior, he united a careless extravagance which had crippled him with debt, and a looseness of habit which had brought him unfavourably under the notice of the government.

  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.

  At the “barge procession” from Greenwich to the Tower, on the occasion of Anne Boleyn’s coronation, a pale, sad, abstracted-looking gentleman sat beside the Duke of Norfolk in one of the royal barges. The sickly countenance of this young man presented a peculiar contrast with a rich crimson velvet dress, trimmed with miniver, and cap of the same colour, surmounted with a small white feather, and surrounded by a bandeau of rubies. He had small dark eyes, insignificant when bent upon the ground, but brilliant and piercing when raised to encounter the gaze of others; thin compressed lips; a sharp and beardless chin, and a delicate, almost languid appearance. Such was the poet Surrey, as he appeared at the coronation procession of his unfortunate cousin Anne Boleyn.

The Æneid

  Before in age, if not also in noble, courtly, and lustrous English, is that of the Songes and Sonnettes of Henry Howard earl of Surrey,… written chiefly by him, and by sir Thomas Wiat, not the dangerous commotioner, but his worthy father. Nevertheless, they who commend those poems and exercises of honourable wit, if they have seen that incomparable earl of Surrey his English translation of Virgil’s Eneids, which, for a book or two, he admirably rendreth, almost line for line, will bear me witness that those other were foils and sportives.

  We meet with so many expressions which Surrey has evidently borrowed, with so many lines adopted with hardly any other alteration than that which the difference of the dialect and of the measure made necessary, and so many taken without any alteration at all, that all doubt ceases. It becomes a matter of certainty that Surrey must have read and studied the Scottish translation before he began his own.

  The unrhimed metre of five accents, or as it is generally termed blank verse, we certainly owe to Surrey. English verse without rhime was no novelty; and the “cadence” of Chaucer comes full as near to the blank verse of five accents, as the loose rhythms of some of our dramatists; but I have seen no specimen of any definite unrhimed metre of five accents, which can date earlier than Surrey’s translation of the fourth Eneid. His verse was certainly considered, at the time, as something new, for the second edition of his translation is entitled, “The foorth boke of Virgill, &c. translated into English, and drawn into a straunge metre by Henry, Earle of Surrey.” As Surrey was well acquainted with Italy and its literature, and as the Italians were already making efforts to banish rhyme from their poetry, it is possible he may have taken the hint from them; but, in fact, the subject of unrhymed verse had for some time fixed the attention of scholars, very generally, throughout Europe.

  There are passages of excellence in the work, and very rarely does a verse quite fail. But, as might be expected, it is somewhat stiff, and, as it were, stunted in sound; partly from the fact that the lines are too much divided, where distinction would have been sufficient. It would have been strange, indeed, if he had at once made a free use of a rhythm which every boy-poet now thinks he can do what he pleases with, but of which only a few ever learn the real scope and capabilities. Besides, the difficulty was increased by the fact that the nearest approach to it in measure was the heroic couplet, so well known in our language, although scarce one who has used it has come up to the variousness of its modelling in the hands of Chaucer, with whose writings Surrey was of course familiar.

General

  In the Earle of Surries “Liricks,” many things tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble minde.

  The particular fame of learning, wit, and poetic fancy, which he was thought once to have sufficiently made appear in his published poems, which nevertheless are now so utterly forgotten, as though they had never been extant; so antiquated at present, and as it were out of fashion, is the style and way of poetry of that age.

	Here noble Surrey felt the sacred rage,
	Surrey, the Granville of a former age:
	Matchless his pen, victorious was his lance,
	Bold in the lists, and graceful in the dance:
	In the same shades the Cupids tuned his lyre,
	To the same notes of love, and soft desire:
	Fair Geraldine, bright object of his vow,
	Then filled the groves, as heavenly Mira now.

  Surrey, for his justness of thought, correctness of style, and purity of expression, may justly be pronounced the first English classical poet. He unquestionably is the first polite writer of love-verses in our language.

  One of the best and earliest attempts in England to naturalise the sonnet, is to be found in the pages of the gallant Surrey, whose compositions in this department, making due allowance for the imperfect state of the language in which he wrote, have a simplicity and chastity in their style and thought, which merit every encomium.

  At length we reach the illustrious names of Surrey and Wyatt; whose productions, during a period devoted to dull allegory, duller romance, and the dullest of all possible didactic and moral poetry, strike us as a green and refreshing oasis in a dreary desert. At the mention of their names—the heart of Hortensius feels an increased glow of inspiration: and the last and most learned Editor of their works finds himself naturally, as it were, discoursing with many of the most illustrious characters of the reign of Henry VIII. But the bibliomaniac secretly rejoices in the possession of the earlier, rarer, and more precious editions of the “Songes and Sonnettes,” as among the keimelia of his Collection.

  His poetry makes the ear lean to it, it is so sweet and low; the English he made it of, being ready to be sweet, and falling ripe in sweetness into other hands than his.

  With all his taste and real feeling; his verse is a hollow artificial mockery to the living voice of Spenser’s.

  His language is often happy, and never superfluous. There is a studious air in his lines which takes off something from the fresh flavour of the thought, presenting it rather in its prepared than in its natural form. Hence we have much sweetness, and even tenderness; but no spontaneous bursts of passion forcing their way through the restraints of art. He is amongst the earliest of our love poets, and will always be read with interest for the sake of his purity and refinement; but he is inferior in earnestness and depth of emotion to some who succeeded him, especially the poets of the age of Elizabeth.

  His poetry, with fine lines, and here and there passages of considerable power, would not, apart from his rank, his story, and his poetic position, preserve his name. It is full of crude conceits and unintelligible tortuosities of thought and rhyme. Much as he sings of love, he is, on the whole, a frigid writer, and has preserved purity at the expense of nature and fervour of passion. He was a star in the poetic horizon when stars were few, and owes it to darkness and to distance rather than to merit that his light still glimmers—it can hardly be said to shine—upon us; and we accept it not as poetry itself, but merely as containing in it the hope and promise of future and far superior song.

  The true merit of Surrey is, that, proceeding upon the same system of versification which had been introduced by Chaucer, and which, indeed, had in principle been followed by all the writers after Chaucer, however rudely or imperfectly some of them may have succeeded in the practice of it, he restored to our poetry a correctness, polish, and general spirit of refinement such as it had not known since Chaucer’s time, and of which, therefore, in the language as now spoken, there was no previous example whatever. To this it may be added that he appears to have been the first, at least in this age, who sought to modulate his strains after that elder poetry of Italy, which thenceforward became one of the chief fountain-heads of inspiration to that of England throughout the whole space of time over which is shed the golden light of the names of Spenser, of Shakspeare, and of Milton. Surrey’s own imagination was neither rich nor soaring; and the highest qualities of his poetry, in addition to the facility and general mechanical perfection of the versification, are delicacy and tenderness. It is altogether a very light and bland Favonian breeze.

  Surrey’s translation of Virgil is as bald and repulsive a version as can well be. Of his famous love poems in honor of Geraldine, nine are written in a metre so absurd (alternate twelve and fourteen syllable lines) that it would spoil the effect of far better matter; and the unchanging querulous whine which characterizes the whole series renders it tedious reading. In truth, notwithstanding the senseless encomiums which Dr. Nott lavished on his favorite author, the gems in Surrey are but few, and may be counted on one’s fingers. The sonnets beginning “Give place, ye lovers,” “The sote season,” and “Set me whereas,” nearly exhaust the list.

  An English Petrarch: no juster title could be given to Surrey, for it expresses his talent as well as his disposition. In fact, like Petrarch, the oldest of the humanists, and the earliest exact writer of the modern tongue, Surrey introduces a new style, a manly style, which marks a great transformation of the mind…. He looks forward to the last line whilst writing the first. He keeps the strongest word for the last, and shows the symmetry of ideas by the symmetry of phrases. Sometimes he guides the intelligence by a continuous series of contrasts to the final image; a kind of sparkling casket, in which he means to deposit the idea which he carries, and to which he directs our attention from the first. Sometimes he leads his reader to the close of a long flowery description, and then suddenly checks him with a sorrowful phrase. He arranges his process, and knows how to produce effects; he uses classical expressions, in which two substantives, each supported by its adjective, are balanced on either side of the verb. He collects his phrases in harmonious periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears any more than of the mind. By his inversions he adds force to his ideas, and weight to his argument. He selects elegant or noble terms, rejects idle words and redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor a sentiment. There is eloquence in the regular development of his thought; music in the sustained accent of his verse…. We do not find in him a bold genius, an impassioned writer capable of wide expansion, but a courtier, a lover of elegance, who, penetrated by the beauties of two complete literatures, imitates Horace and the chosen masters of Italy, corrects and polishes little morsels, aims at speaking perfectly a fine language. Amongst semi-barbarians he wears a dress-coat becomingly. Yet he does not wear it completely at his ease: he keeps his eyes too exclusively on his models, and does not venture to permit himself frank and free gestures.

  Surrey has not the deep and subtle feelings of Wyat; but he has a captivating sweetness, a direct eloquence, a generous impetuosity, that make him a much more universal favourite…. Surrey’s originality was not of the fastidious kind that rejects thoughts and images simply because they have occurred to a predecessor. His imagery is not strikingly new. In his irresistible energetic way he made free use of whatever suggested itself in the moment of composition, no matter where it might have come from. He borrowed many phrases, many images, and many hints of phrases and images, from his friend Wyat. What he borrowed, however, he passed through his own mint…. Compared with Wyat, Surrey strikes one as having much greater affluence of words—the language is more plastic in his hands. When his mind is full of an idea, he pours it forth with soft voluble eloquence; he commands such abundance of words that he preserves with ease a uniform measure. Uniformity, indeed, is almost indispensable to such abundance: we read him with the feeling that in a “tumbling metre” his fluency would run away with him…. Surrey goes beyond Wyat in the enthusiasm of nature, in the worship of bud and bloom. In the depths of his amorous despair, the beauty of the tender green, and the careless happiness of the brute creation, arrest his eye, and detain him for certain moments from his own sorrow.

  He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction.

  The distinctive feature of Surrey’s genius is its ductility; its characteristic qualities are grace, vivacity, pathos, picturesqueness. He had the temperament of a true poet, refinement, sensibility, a keen eye for the beauties of nature, a quick and lively imagination, great natural powers of expression. His tone is pure and lofty, and his whole writings breathe that chivalrous spirit which still lingered among the satellites of the eighth Henry. His diction is chaste and perspicuous, and though it bears all the marks of careful elaboration it has no trace of stiffness or pedantry. His verse is so smooth, and at times so delicately musical, that Warton questioned whether in these qualities at least our versification has advanced since Surrey tuned it for the first time. Without the learning of Wyatt, his literary skill is far greater.

  Surrey has even no small mastery of what may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence in successive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a mere reduplication of the notes.

  The work of Surrey in the reform of English poetry was of a kind altogether different from that of Wyatt. His poems have none of the vehement individuality and character which distinguish the style of his predecessor and contemporary. He is essentially the representative of a class…. He follows Wyatt in the imitation of foreign models, but he succeeds where Wyatt failed, in naturalising the ideas he borrows by the beauty of his style. Style is, in fact, Surrey’s predominant poetical virtue; and, appearing as he did when art was the one thing needful for the development of the language, it is to his style that he owes his great position in the History of English Poetry.